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School Management, 



INCLUDING 



A TOPICAL OUTLINE FOR THE STUDY 

OF SCHOOL LAW IN CONNECTION 

WITH THE MANAGEMENT 

TOPICS PRESENTED. 



JASPER NEWTON WILKINSON. 

President Kansas State Normal School, Emporia, Kansas. 



TOPEKA, KANSAS : 

CEANE & COMPANY, PEINTEES. 

1903. 









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THE ! iBRARY OF 






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Copyright by 






Jasper Newton Wilkinson, 




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1903. 




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INTEODUOTION". 



The Need of Special Study will be appreciated if thought- 
fully considered. The plans of management that other teachers 
have been seen to use are the plans generally pursued by young 
teachers, and it is even true also that the teacher with abundant 
experience still follows in a large measure the principal features 
of school management which he witnessed in his childhood. No 
mere imitator can, however, attain to the excellence of his model. 
He will not only fall short of realizing his model's results when 
they should be realized, but he will also lack discrimination as to 
the kind of circumstances under which the plans he has copied 
should be followed. The Mongolian fashion of imitating with- 
out thought not only gives little promise of advancement, but 
hinders the advancement of all who come under its influence. 
The schools would suffer greater injury than would any other 
activity of our modern civilization by the employing of such 
" Chinese cheap labor." The teacher who would rise to highest 
efficiency must study carefully plans of management that he has 
seen in operation. The progressive teacher must examine thor- 
oughly even the plans that he may have been using in his own 
work, and must learn how to eliminate the bad and elaborate the 
good. In utilizing the plans that are used by others, he must 
apply the test of his own best thought. These considerations 

(9) 



10 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

justify the current saying that we should adapt from other 
teachers, but never adopt. One who has taken merely the aca- 
demic instruction in a good school is no more prepared by this 
experience to manage a school successfully than is the passenger 
who has been riding on railroad trains prepared to take entire 
charge as a conductor of a train. If the railroad train is man- 
aged successfully, the passenger sees little of the conductor's 
operations; if, on the other hand, the conductor is constantly 
disturbing the passengers with the details that should nevei* 
attract attention, he does not afford an example worthy to 
follow. There are relations to establish in the management 
of a school and details to organize, which the casual atten- 
tion of a student will overlook or misunderstand. If the 
student in an academic subject is giving his attention to the 
teacher's plans of management and is studying the details of 
his management, the teacher is not a good manager, and his 
plans cannot be worthy of adoption. The study of school man- 
agement should be isolated as far as possible from all distract- 
ing considerations, and must have undivided attention if it is 
to be successfully pursued. A careful study of the reasons why 
in matters of school management not only gives strength which 
the teacher needs for the beginning of his career, but forms for 
him a habit which will be of great value to him in meeting new 
questions during all the years of his work. 

As Distinguished from Related Subjects, school management 
should have well-defined boundaries. It is not always clearly 
distinguished from methods of instruction and from philosophy 
of education. The distinction between the lecture and the text- 
book method of teaching is an illustration of a discussion that 
may be found in well-known books on all three of these sub- 



INTRODUCTION. 11 



jects. Applied psychology and kindred terms are used with 
propriety to cover ground belonging to all three. As a first 
step in separating the concrete from the general, methods and 
management have been treated together very frequently under 
some such double title as "theory and art of teaching." Ap- 
plied psychology, methods and management are so closely inter- 
twined with one another that their complete separation is 
impossible. Nevertheless, each of these branches is so far from 
the others in some portions as to be clearly distinguished; for 
instance, plans of management may be properly varied by sets 
of rules and conditions that differ greatly under different circum- 
stances, while methods as a distinct subject cannot follow arbi- 
trary rules that may be fixed by local authorities. Some plans 
of school management are fixed by usage only, and so firmly fixed 
that they are unwritten law ; matters of method- change more 
easily if reason for change can be shown. Legislation may 
properly determine many matters pertaining' to school manage- 
ment, but boards of education and state legislatures would make 
a great mistake if they should endeavor to prescribe or to pro- 
scribe any methods. These considerations would suggest that 
school law as a professional study belongs in the field of school 
management. 

The philosophy of education furnishes the foundation for 
correct methods and management, and should of course be, in a 
true sense, psychology applied to education. Methods of instruc- 
tion should exhibit the process of the mind in attaining the power 
which education gives. The study of methods may be almost in- 
definitely extended in the interpretation of these processes as 
seen in the various school studies. Methods and management 
agree in being the concrete application of educational philosophy, 



12 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

and it is the business of each of these subjects to go into a 
minuteness of detail which would seem trivial in philosophy. 
If a science of education mentions the details that belong in 
methods and management, they are mentioned merely for the 
purpose of illustrating the principles set forth, while on the 
other hand the references that methods and management make to 
philosophical principles are made for the sake of building on a 
sure foundation. While philosophy of education should logic- 
ally precede methods and management, the chronological order 
may wisely leave the formal study of philosophy until after the 
more concrete problems of methods and management have been 
studied. The laws of mind, the play of motives, the deepest 
ethical questions, must all be recognized in these concrete sub- 
jects; and while management is perhaps more concrete than 
method, it is under the same necessity of seeking its guidance 
in philosophy. While method concerns itself with bringing the 
mind and knowledge into proper relations for the act of learn- 
ing, management concerns itself with the creating of conditions 
that facilitate this act of learning. Financial limitations, stat- 
utory regulations, public sentiment, the tendencies of human 
nature, and the effect of all kinds of environment may be studied 
with profit and with a good degree of success by those who have 
done little or no formal work in psychology, and should be 
studied carefully by all who expect to teach. 

Collateral reading in connection with any text on this sub- 
ject is of great importance to the student. The text itself 
should suggest lines of thought and investigation. What the 
text says on the subject need not be so profound as to make 
the reading of its pages a particularly invigorating mental ex- 
ercise. The memorizing of the outline and the grasping of the 



INTRODUCTION. 13 



thought of the best possible book on school management will not 
give so much strength as will the investigating of all sources of 
information. A library on this subject can be easily gathered. 
~Not the buying of books on school management is advised, but 
rather the collecting of unorganized and unassimilated material 
on this subject. In the text-book, work whose doing would give 
strength is already done for the student. Files of educational 
journals and reports of educational gather ings, such as the 
National Educational Association, give him an opportunity to 
select for himself the thoughts that bear on his subject. The 
reports 'of committees of investigation on school-management 
subjects are much more comprehensive than any school text 
should be. The reports of state and city superintendents usually 
contain much material on these topics. For the study of school 
law, as suggested here, there must be thorough investigation. 
This text could not give a summary of legislation in all the 
states, nor even a statement of points in which all agree. The 
student should supplement the statutes of his own state with a 
study of court decisions and opinions by eminent authorities, 
and rulings by such officers as the state superintendent. The 
collateral reading here suggested will give the student a knowl- 
edge of the growth of ideas and practices in school management 
and school legislation, and will make him much stronger than 
the mere study of a single text could make him. 

The Teacher is the Center. Of all the agents, appliances and 
conditions that affect school management, the teacher is, to 
change the figure, the shaping force, the leading factor in the 
production of agencies outside of himself, the chief influence 
uniting all agencies, appliances and conditions for the success- 
ful prosecution of the work of the school. 



14 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

The teacher is able to influence young people to choose teach- 
ing as a career, and he should know well what are the natural 
qualifications that would justify a hope of success in that career, 
and what preparation should be made in order to attain success. 
The teacher must shape the organization, and must give life to 
the management of his school, assured that no one else can do 
this work for him, and that if he does it well, his school will 
accomplish good results. The adaptation of building, apparatus 
and school supplies of all kinds, needs the guidance of the dis- 
creet and intelligent teacher, and he should be able to give to 
those who are to provide material appliances for the school, wise 
advice and assistance whenever the opportunity offers. Many a 
school building is destitute of important conveniences, even to 
the extent of hindering the success of the school, all because 
a teacher who could have secured a hearing during its construc- 
tion did not know what suggestions to make. All classes of 
people in a community are in need of leadership to make their 
help most effective for the improvement of the school, and the 
teacher should make all possible preparation for the responsi- 
bilities of whatever leadership may be open to him. 

The following pages, while presenting matters of school man- 
agement that vitally concern others besides the teacher, address 
all these discussions to the teacher, because from him as a center 
should radiate influences which will give life and nourishment 
and growth to every organ of the school system. 



I. THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 



1. Natural Equipment. 

Physically , the teacher should be healthy, in full possession 
of all the senses, especially those of sight and hearing, free from 
any deformity that would hinder his efficiency or make his ap- 
pearance offensive. 

The unhealthy person should, for his own safety and well- 
being, avoid the profession of teaching. He will make a serious 
mistake if he feels that the freedom from exposure and the relief 
from physical exertion which the teacher's "work permits will 
be a protection or a cure for him. An invalid should choose 
some business in which he can shape the conditions for his own 
comfort and recovery. But if the invalid will not keep out of 
the teacher's place for his own sake, he should be considerate 
enough to spare the pupils. They should not suffer the discom- 
fort which comes from constant association with a teacher who 
lacks the cheer of good health. Not only are their spirits de- 
pressed as a result of their sympathy, but their own physical 
well-being is liable to be endangered by continuous confinement 
in a room where sickness poisons the air. Moreover, the sick 
teacher can hardly hope to maintain that alertness which is 
necessary to govern successfully, and it is especially true that a 
teacher with defective sight or hearing or with such lameness as 
to move about the room with difficulty, is physically unfit for the 

(15) 



16 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

general work of a teacher. Candidates for the military service 
are peremptorily rejected if there is the remotest danger that 
physical defects may cause disability. The entrance to the 
public service in the schools should be guarded with equal care. 

Temperament is a matter of very great importance in this 
connection. The person who is nervous will find that a teacher's 
life is a continuous worry. If every dropping of a book or 
slamming of a door startles him and makes him manifest his 
nervousness, he is likely as a teacher both to suffer and cause 
great annoyance. The nervous temperament is prone to over- 
work in the schoolroom, partly because of excessive zeal, which 
attempts more than any one could endure, and partly because of 
deficient physical strength, which could not endure even ordi- 
nary effort. On the other hand, the vital temperament is too 
slow and sluggish. This is the temperament of lazy people; 
it does not prompt its owner to attempt too much. The nervous 
temperament and the vital temperament are in many respects 
opposites, and each of these temperaments has some merits in 
escaping the dangers of the other. The motive temperament, 
characterized by a cheerful buoyancy without f rivolity^ a serene 
poise without inertness, and a steady industry without excess, 
is the temperament that will most easily attain success in teach- 
ing. The combination of the good points of all these tempera- 
ments makes the well-balanced teacher. 

The personal appearance one is likely to carry through life 
will early manifest itself as attractive or unattractive. Physical 
peculiarities, such as being over or under usual size, while not 
fatally destructive of efficiency, will be noticed more frequently 
in a public position like that of a teacher than in pursuits more 
retired from the presence of others. While it is desirable that 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. tf 



a teacher should be personally attractive, it is to be remembered, 
nevertheless, that persons who are unduly conscious of their 
personal beauty and perfection are likely to neglect other quali- 
fications of greater importance. 

Mentally, the proper person to enter the teaching profession 
is well-balanced and* symmetrical. It is sometimes thought that 
one who has an exceptionally good memory and seems on that 
account to learn easily, would be especially fitted for teaching. 
Unusual mental power of any kind may render a teacher unsym- 
pathetic toward the great mass of pupils, who must plod across 
the rough ground over which his strong intellectual wings have 
borne him in rapid progress with scarcely an effort. The person 
with exceptional memory power will probably fail on that ac- 
count to cultivate reason and other powers whose work is not 
needed to reach conclusions which are already stored in his 
memory. Such a person, when teaching, would be in danger 
of training the minds of his pupils to follow the abnormal habits 
of his own mind, and would thus neglect the cultivation of those 
faculties in them that are deficient in himself. He who dis- 
covers in his mental powers the ability to succeed fairly well 
in all the subjects commonly taught in the schools, has more 
reason to think of teaching as a business than does he who is 
exceptionally bright in some of the subjects, and peculiarly dull 
or even a little below the ordinary in others. Prospects of be- 
coming a fine penman or a skillful artist or a good musician 
are not enough to justify a choice of the teaching profession, 
even as a specialist in those subjects. Unequalled excellence 
in one thing cannot give success in teaching it if other requisites 
are wanting. As most of the profession must teach in the ordi- 
nary public-school grades, power to teach in an acceptable man- 



18 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

ner all the common subjects is most to be desired, and one may 
teach them all well without being a genius. 

The power to control one's voice in speech is more important 
to a teacher than is skill in any of the above accomplishments. 
The teacher's speaking voice should be able to sweep through the 
whole gamut of thought and feeling. Ability to sing with ex- 
pression will greatly help a teacher, but a voice that can adapt 
itself to all the demands of speech is more important. The whole 
atmosphere of the school may be in a continual storm by the 
disturbing effect of the strident tones of the teacher, but the 
billowy restlessness may be soothed by the voice that is like oil 
on the troubled waters. There is frequently something of phys- 
ical condition to be considered in the qualities of the voice, and 
it is likewise true that moral conditions also have their in- 
fluence. It should also be remarked that some of the moral 
characteristics presented below have a basis in mental or phys- 
ical peculiarities, or both. These interrelationships show the 
necessity of symmetry in all the powers and all the possibilities 
of those who are to become teachers. 

Morally, the tendency of a young person contemplating teach- 
ing is a matter of the very greatest consequence. In considering 
moral character as a condition precedent to the choice of the 
teacher's vocation, we shall not dwell on habits, even though they 
become matters of such great importance when they have thrown 
their chains about one in the experiences of years. The proba- 
bility that the future teacher will be able to avoid bad habits 
and to form a good moral character is, however, a prime 
requisite. Evidence of the power of self-control should be un- 
mistakable in one who is to become a teacher. A will-power 
that establishes self-control if there is really a forceful self to 



TEE TEACHER'S PREP AR AT WIS 7 . 19 

be controlled, is likely to be sufficient for the control of others. 
Proper self-control will give evidence of that unfailing patience 
which should *find early manifestation in the teacher. There is 
a proper quality of love for children and interest in them, and it 
is not the foolish fondness or the illusive playfulness in one's 
association with children which marks him as a teacher, but 
rather a hearty interest in their well-being, and a genuine sym- 
pathy with them in all their experiences. 

The motive which is likely to control one's career is an all- 
important moral consideration. One who seeks personal ease is 
more likely to find it in some other sphere than the schoolroom. 
One who wishes to accumulate wealth makes a mistake to spend 
any part of his time in teaching. He may be able to acquire 
more money per month as a teacher than he could at any other 
employment open to him at the time, but he will not gain, in the 
doing of proper teaching, the experiences and' the opportunities 
by which great fortunes are made. If he sets out to teach and 
to gain wealth he will fail in both. 

For a young person who desires to attain the best of things 
in his own growth and training, and to do the utmost possible 
good for humanity, there is no better vocation than teaching. 
Training for this service and devotion to its duties, are all in 
keeping with the highest life into which humanity can enter, 
and with every effort which seeks to bring others into that 
highest life. 

2. Reflex Effects to be Anticipated. 

Change in the nature of a person is likely to result from any 
lifelong employment. All things bear upon themselves the im- 
press of the experiences through which they have passed. The 



20 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

eye of man may fail to recognize the record, or recognizing it, 
may misinterpret it, but no one can doubt that the marks left 
by successive causes constitute a trustworthy account of those 
causes. This is the record which the geologist reads, and the 
record which tells the whole story of evolution. The human race 
carries constantly the evidences of the mode of life of its an- 
cestors. In like manner, each person's self of to-day carries 
the record of the same self of yesterday and of all previous days. 
The effects which these previous days have produced go on 
record for the perusal of every careful observer, and they tell 
the true story of the past, without regard to any wish we may 
have to conceal it. We can even follow the making of this record 
in persons who were in youth " similar and similarly situated," 
but became very different in the different experiences of their 
later years. The differences of appearance that result from dif- 
ferent occupations are but a hint of the differences of character 
and tendencies. A true understanding of the effects that return 
upon the worker from his work is important in the choice of a 
pursuit for life. 

The teacher's profession has its full share of bad effects as well 
as good. A knowledge of these effects should enable one who 
thinks of teaching to determine whether he can risk the bad in 
order to gain the good, or whether he can resist the bad effects 
and receive to the full the good effects. There have been those 
who seemed to themselves and their friends specially fitted for 
teaching simply because they have, to begin with, the unfavora- 
ble peculiarities which the teacher's work tends to produce. 
As we find that, in the case of the call to the ministry, the boy 
whose clerical manners make all the church deacons call him, 
from his childhood, is not to be the man whom the Lord calls 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 21 



to the largest usefulness in His vineyard, so we find that those 
who are divinely fitted for a long and successful career as 
teachers are not the weak in body nor the precocious in mind, 
but those who have most power to resist the harmful tendencies 
of that profession. 

The ideal teacher is the man or the woman who is the least 
susceptible to harm, and the most susceptible to help from the 
peculiar effects of the schoolroom. We have seen those who 
from the beginning of their work as. teachers steadily grew under 
its influences into greatness ; we have seen others languish under 
the same influences into weakness and worthlessness. " One 
man's meat is another man's poison." 

Most persons may find in the memories of a few years, some 
such illustration as the following: Two young men, with ap- 
parently equal chances for a future, had been boys together in 
the country school, in the getting of their first certificates, in the 
neighboring districts of their first teaching. One used his spare 
money in getting ■ a team and then rented a farm, and all his 
months of teaching winter schools were dominated by one ambi- 
tion,- — to stock that farm and buy it and get more land around 
it. He continued teaching school in winter, first in one district 
and then in another in the neighborhood of his farm, running 
down in price and efficiency till at last he failed in the county 
examination, and the poor teacher had become a poor farmer. 

The other young man drew his salary as teacher with the 
sole purpose of fitting himself for better work. His whole being 
was quickened with the enthusiasm which his work inspired. 
His fellow-teachers in associations and institutes added to the 
zeal which his contact with the pupils had given him. He had 
the good judgment to refuse offers of continued employment, 



22 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

whenever he had money enough at command that he might take 
an advanced course of study. His success was so sure that diffi- 
cult positions sought him with the determination to offer induce- 
ments enough to secure him. And so he went on increasing in 
power, and constantly found demand for his increased power, — 
a noble example of the growth to which the teacher's work may 
open the way. 

Nervousness is, perhaps, a result most to be feared. This 
develops in teachers who did not begin their careers with a nerv- 
ous temperament. There are constant opportunities for worry. 
The constant watching of a thermometer is enough to cause 
nervous prostration in one likely to be impatient. If one is 
inclined to neglect exercise, indigestion and dyspepsia and their 
resulting woes await him in the teaching profession. The grind 
of the teacher's long hours, of the examination papers and av- 
erages, taken with his hours in schoolrooms never perfect in 
ventilation, robs him of that sunlight and pure air which all 
living objects, except such as mushrooms, find necessary to their 
well-being. There is probably no teacher who does not feel 
that on many or all of these points he has need of repentance, 
and he may use as peculiarly appropriate that passage from the 
prayer-book : " We have done those things which we ought not 
to have done, we have left undone those things which we ought 
to have done, and there is no health in us." 

On the other side of this question as to the physical effects of 
our work, we may as well begin by saying, as the negative usually 
does in the debate, that we do not fully concede the truth of any 
of the points in the affirmative. It surely is not necessary that 
the teacher who is on his guard against these dangers should 
suffer very greatly from them. The great number of hours prac- 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 23 

tically at his own command, his cleanly occupation, all give him 
the best opportunity to care for his health. 

The worthy teacher can surely be expected to care for his 
nerves, his digestion, his circulation, and his muscular well- 
being. Walking or riding for air and sunlight, and a vigorous 
use of gymnastic apparatus for those who prefer this as a means 
of health, may be commended along with some home duties, 
some work that will demand change of clothing during the day, 
some sweeping and dusting of home rooms, some milking of 
cows and caring for horses, some sawing of wood, some running 
of errands; and these suggested employments are left to be 
divided among the ladies and gentlemen of the profession as 
they may choose. No one ever knew teachers to produce any 
effect on their health, in this way, except the very best. A walk 
without aim, without life, is not so good as may be almost any 
employment with a purpose. Men might sweep their own rooms 
or women groom favorite horses with all their hearts, provided 
their hearts are large enough for some other things besides. 
There is every reason to believe, in view of all the facts, that 
the teacher's profession stands well among those of the world in 
its tendency to promote the physical well-being of those who 
engage in it. 

Business incompetency is liable to characterize the teacher. 
He scarcely enters upon the course of that great school of trade 
which is the postgraduate work of so many of his pupils. One 
who simply draws and spends a salary gets little business expe- 
rience, and is likely to form ridiculous notions of the methods of 
trade. For instance, a certain teacher, knowing that some of 
his friends were subscribing for shares in a loan association and 
making regular payments, and knowing also that some were 



24 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

giving their shares to the association as security for money they 
wished to borrow from it, seriously thought he could at once 
get money enough to buy himself a home by subscribing for 
shares to the amount of its full cost and getting the full face of 
the shares as a loan. He could not understand that this would 
be no more security for the loan than would his own unsecured 
promise to pay. The mere wage-earner does not, for obvious 
reasons, ordinarily engage in very large credit transactions. He 
is, however, under temptation constantly to anticipate his next 
payment of salary in a manner which gives him the habits of a 
spendthrift. While it is an advantage for a young person to be 
able to reach self-support without capital, while the work of a 
teacher is thought to be financially promising because it pays 
more than the wages of the unskilled laborer, there is the dan- 
ger that he will not learn how to save carefully nor to invest 
wisely. 

Conservatism is likely to develop as a result of the teacher's 
associations and duties. He has enough to do in helping the 
young to take possession of their inherited knowledge. He leads 
successive classes along the same beaten paths, and has little 
time to search even for shorter and better ways, much less for 
the discovery of new goals to be attained. This is but another 
way of expressing the common thought that the teacher falls 
into ruts. He certainly is not driven to seek improved methods 
as the business man is driven by competition to seek better 
processes. If he finds anything that he thinks is new, he parades 
it so constantly that it is soon worn threadbare. Where is the 
teacher without his hobby ? Fortunately for the patrons of the 
schools, not all have the same hobbies. When a new teacher 
comes, he immediately reconstructs the course of study, and 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 25 

gives great prominence to the things which he can do well, thus 
traveling with his hobbies along his same old roads. From tend- 
encies of this kind, every teacher is more or less in danger of 
one-sided development. In the very nature of things, the teacher 
marching in the ranks is not likely to cultivate the power of 
initiative, but is more likely to suffer atrophy in whatever 
ability for original work or radical advancement he may have 
possessed. The notable exceptions but prove the rule. 

Affectation and conceit are liable to take possession of the 
teacher. Often he tries to seem what he is not — to be so very- 
precise, so very learned, so very distinguished, that he becomes 
a laughing-stock to all the irreverent youth of the neighborhood. 
He not only thinks of himself too much, but he also thinks too 
much of himself. This is liable to be true of the self-made man, 
who, as said by some wit, almost always worships his creator. 
He not only worships himself, but he thinks all the neighborhood 
should join in the worship. If he is a young man, he thinks 
that most of the young ladies in the community covet his atten- 
tion ; if a young woman, she feels that she is the cynosure of all 
eyes. Such an impression of one's self is not favorable to the 
best mental growth, and it is comforting to know that, in most 
cases, this common error will not last long. There are, however, 
influences strengthening the teacher's conceit through his whole 
career. He knows much more than the pupils with whom he 
spends his time can claim to know. The flatterers of the com- 
munity find that he enjoys the wonder that one small head can 
hold the things he knows. He enjoys this so much that readiness 
to take his knowledge for granted leads him to pretend to know 
what he does not know. Along with this pretense of wisdom, he 
is liable to combine the habit of fawning in the presence of those 



26 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

on whom lie is dependent for his position. Many a teacher seeks 
to hold public favor by his obsequiousness. He is too deferen- 
tial. He has no opinion of his own. He will teach that the 
earth is round or that the earth is flat, just as the community 
may prefer. And yet this same fawning cur may be m the 
presence of his inferiors a veritable tyrant, lording it over his 
pupils in a most dictatorial fashion when he thinks there is 
nothing to be lost by his gratifying his naturally mean disposi- 
tion. In so far as the schoolmaster's business gives rewards for 
obsequiousness or the opportunity for tyranny, it is detrimental 
to the growth of his noblest character. 

A bad temper is likely to be the kind gained in the school- 
room, because any temper one may have is likely to be frequently 
lost there. What seems to be the teacher's proper work in gov- 
erning a school tells, in many, if not in most cases, unfavorably 
upon his disposition. He is a combination of policeman and de- 
tective. He sees so many samples of the waywardness of human 
nature that he constantly suspects even those who should not 
be suspected ; he has so much difficulty in gaining information 
which he wants and in securing cooperation where he should 
have it, that he conceals his interest in subjects that deserve it. 
Such constant anxiety and constant restraint are utterly destruc- 
tive of that peace of mind and nobleness of character which are 
essential to the highest mental and moral excellence. 

The person contemplating the choice of the teaching profession 
will find most satisfaction in contemplating its favorable in- 
fluences on the mental and moral condition. No person can 
successfully teach in a country whose standards are as high as 
they are in this without taking into his own mental make-up 
much that is desirable. 



TEE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 27 



The habit of thoroughness is not so well fixed in any other 
pursuits. The teacher's knowledge of the subjects he teaches 
becomes much more accurate than the knowledge of the academic 
subjects ever becomes in the other professions. Those who teach 
are often astonished that the subjects with which they deal were 
so little understood by them in even satisfactory work as 
students. A subject recited once, or at most but a few times, by 
a student is soon forgotten ; but a subject taught year after year 
becomes the teacher's possession for all the years of life. 

Punctuality is a lesson learned by the teacher as few learn it. 
Somebody says that railroads running on a definite time-table 
have been for their patrons and employes a great educator in 
promoting promptness. Surely the teacher who year after year 
makes his accustomed round on regular time acquires a system 
and promptness in his work which makes him a more effective 
worker than he could be without that habit. * 

Persistence as acquired from the very difficulties of the 
teacher's position, is no mean element of success. All will re- 
member the lesson which carried the Hoosier schoolmaster suc- 
cessfully through his struggle in that famous school. He took 
his inspiration from the characteristic of the bulldog : " If Bull 
once takes hold, heaven and yarth can't make him let go." It is 
this kind of persistency that has sustained many a teacher until 
it becomes a part of his very nature. 

. Freedom from temptation is a blessing to the teacher. The 
snares which tempt so many in other lines of business do not 
come near him. The cares of this world and the deceitfulness 
of riches are not spoken of in the Scriptures for the warning of 
the teacher. He is not loaded down with that kind of care. He 



28 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



does not come into constant contact with the greed for gain. He 
need not be filled with the mania for speculation. He is not seek- 
ing to get something for nothing. He does not need to engage in 
financial ventures that become a species of gambling. He does 
not* have idle hours that seek excitement in places of question- 
able amusement. He is not so ignorant as to be enticed into 
vice to learn the ways of the world. The temptations always 
ready to attack the weakness of human nature find few vulner- 
able points in the proper armor of the teacher. How fortunate 
is he whose associations are such that in his whole round of 
duties there need be no dwelling on impure thoughts! The 
world of trade receives suggestions of evil, comes in contact 
with vice, "endures temptations that the teacher need never know. 
His work is preeminently the search after the truth, the leading of 
the pure mind of childhood in ways of pleasantness and paths of 
peace. He has no encouragement to impure words, no invita- 
tion to entertain in continual companionship those who thirst 
for the vile story and the vulgar jest. His constant call is to 
noble deeds ; his necessity to avoid all immorality, if he would 
hold his place, gives him a habit of right-doing which grows 
into his nature with the years of his service, and casts about him 
safeguards which shall endure until temptation shall be no more. 

Good associations are the privilege of the teacher. Compan- 
ionship with the youth of the land, the purest and noblest it 
affords, is a boon not to be lightly counted. The young people 
who attend school are those whose tastes are noblest, whose pur- 
poses are best, whose strife for better attainment makes them 
an inspiration to all who know them. Other people work among 
the unsorted crowd at best; the teacher works with the select 
portion of the community whose pleasure it is to choose the cul- 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 29 

tivation of the mind. The elements of a community not in 
sympathy with that purpose naturally drop away from the 
schools, and the teacher is relieved of their unpleasant contact. 
What lessons of patience may be learned from students who, 
under great difficulties, persist in their purpose; what lessons 
of cheerfulness from those who, under greater disappointment 
than we have been accustomed to bear, still wear a smile which 
lightens labor ; what lessons of charity from an insight into the 
life of those whom the world judges amiss. The teacher is truly 
indebted to his pupils for many lessons as valuable as any he 
ever teaches them. 

A high standard of morality must be maintained by the 
teacher, and this high standard exerts upon his character an 
influence whose worth cannot be estimated. The true teacher 
constantly grows to higher ideals of moral excellence, and sees 
as truly as mortal man can see the difficulty of their complete 
attainment. 

The religious life attracts the teacher. The call to its re- 
sponsibilities comes to him in every precept and admonition for 
the guidance of his pupils, the feeling of his insufficiency, of his 
need of that Divine aid which "he that asketh receiveth," turns 
him to communion with the giver of every good and perfect gift. 
The teacher's profession, more generally than any other of the 
so-called secular professions, heeds the call to the religious life 
and obtains that spiritual strength which the world can neither 
give nor take away. 

When we balance the account in which are recorded the con- 
. siderations for and the considerations against the choice of teach- 
ing as a profession, we shalLfind that the favorable effects this 



30 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



profession exerts upon those who engage in it .far outweigh ill 
importance all the unf avorable, and that one who has the proper 
natural ability to invest in this business need not fear the results 
this investment will give him in its effect upon his own life and 
happiness. 

The young person who has decided, in the light of the fore- 
going, that his natural equipment will warrant his undertaking 
the work of a teacher, and that the effects of this work upon him- 
self are likely to be such as he would be willing to risk, should 
begin at once to make preparation for his chosen profession. 
Natural equipment being, of course, the gift of inheritance, we 
shall not expect preparation to remove all limitations. The reflex 
effects of the teacher's work, while serving in some measure to 
adapt him to his environment, will not bring him to the highest 
efficiency. The mold of inheritance is shaped too early for us 
to change it completely, the trial that comes in life's severest 
stress is too late to make the best preparation to meet such trial. 
It may be conceded that most of the preparation in the first 
years of one who is to teach will be preparation that fits equally 
well for many other vocations. It is, nevertheless, true that 
some of the best preparation for teaching, as it may be made in 
childhood, is not of a kind specially needed for other occupa- 
tions, and that training in certain directions needed to a mod- 
erate extent only, should be carried to greater lengths for the 
making of a teacher. 

3. Habits to be Cultivated. 

The habit of leadership formed in childhood play is of pe- 
culiar value to a teacher, and its formation should begin early. 
The companionship of the playground affords the best of oppor- 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 31 

tunities for developing this power. Nowhere else does one better 
fix the habit of choosing what will commend itself, and of stay- 
ing with his choice until it secures adoption. This does not 
mean that the child who leads is to make a reputation for desir- 
ing above all things else his own way ; he rather gives to each 
of the others his own way, but sees that all the ways come at 
last to the way of the future teacher as the leader. He who is 
learning to be a successful leader must learn how to be a good 
follower, for much of the time he leads best by leading others 
to join him in following some worthy leader. 

Economy of a peculiar kind that includes a certain sort of 
extravagance should be learned by one preparing to teach. He 
will not be able to purchase everything his taste would suggest 
in the matter of dress. He must learn to deny himself things 
that some regard as necessities, and must learn to do that without 
a pang of regret. He should acquire a style of dress which, while 
not the finest that can be found, will accustom him to neatness, 
and will form for hirft such taste that he will not confuse the 
garb of his profession with the style of the overall and the apron 
necessary to protect one in other occupations. This does not 
mean that he must have the habit of wearing Sunday clothes 
every day, for there is recognition of special occasions which 
every one may give in his dress, even though he may be said to 
have only one good suit, and have to wear that every day. On 
the other hand, the habit of extravagance should be formed in 
such matters as the getting of good books. The works one who 
prepares for teaching should read are not likely to pass through 
such large editions as to justify the making of a low price. The 
acknowledgment that books for the young who are to teach are 
not printed in large editions does not concede that each individ- 



32 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

ual looking toward teaching gets along with few books. A child 
preparing for other walks in life may get power from a few 
books, but one who is for a large part of his work to teach the 
use of books must not be content with a knowledge of books that 
is limited by any stinginess in their purchase. Another reason 
for the learning of economy by one who expects to teach is the 
previously mentioned tendency of the teacher toward the care- 
less spending of his salary. The teacher should come to his work 
through a youth of such experience in economy as will assure 
discreet saving and wise expenditure. 

Neatness and order may be mentioned as types of habit that 
should be cultivated from childhood that they may be a charac- 
teristic almost instinctive in the teacher. Dirt is merelv matter 
out of place; he who would be clean must have the habit of 
placing matter where it should be, and of doing the proper plac- 
ing without hesitation and without mistake. The teacher in his 
schoolroom perplexities will forget himself and forget many of 
the other things hardly less important. For instance, if he has 
orown from babyhood spitting whenever and wherever he finds 
it convenient, he is liable to commit offenses in the schoolroom 
without his noticing or remembering what he has done. So 
simple a matter as the dropping of what is cut from a lead- 
pencil when sharpened, may record the teacher's bad habit in 
childhood, and may hinder his securing the cooperation of the 
children in the keeping of a neat, orderly schoolroom. The mis- 
placing of matters about the teacher's person is frequently a 
habit that has come from childhood. The infant's sucking of its 
thumb has a successor in his nibbling his finger-nails, or rubbing 
his hands about his face, or standing with his thumbs in his 
pockets, or sitting with his feet on a chair. Then, too, the eye 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 33 

and the nostril that are to detect filth even at the closest range, 
must have their necessary training begun early. Cleanliness is 
said to be next to godliness, but whatever the relation between 
the two, cleanliness is not a matter of sudden conversion. The 
best preparation for teaching demands a long period of correct 
habit formation in the little matters which are often considered 
unimportant in early years and in other occupations. 

Sincere courtesy is a virtue that cannot be made to order 
when one finds he needs it at the beginning of his professional 
career. There is a suggestive thought in the etymology of sin- 
cere (sine cera), without wax, that is to say, pure honey. We 
should grow up with a genuine desire for the good of others- 
This is the thought of the Scripture verse, " in honor preferring 
one another." This is not the kind of courtesy which is pre- 
scribed by rule, nor is it to be attained by the study of forms of 
etiquette. All worthy social forms are an attempt to express 
this courtesy, but if the genuine spirit of sincere courtesy is 
possessed by one, his observance of proper forms becomes almost 
instinctive, and his conduct is always in proper form, even under 
the circumstances that make exceptions to the rules. There is 
a charity to be cultivated which enables one to search for good 
motives behind the actions of others, as habitually as he does 
for satisfactory explanations of what he has himself done. One 
needs the habit of finding not only the best there is in others, but 
the best that might be in them, and then he can inspire all about 
him to higher ideals. This habit of courtesy, firmly fixed, leaves 
no occasion for that fawning affectation which teachers some- 
times try to use as a temporary substitute for the courtesy not 
to be suddenly learned. This, the harmony of character, becomes 
music to all ears. It takes in different persons the individual 



34 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



differences that characterize the so-called overtones of different 
musical instruments, making a delightful variety, all based on 
fundamental identity. This kindness of spirit will open for the 
teacher, no matter what his peculiarities^the hearts of those who 
make the close acquaintance of the schoolroom, and will secure 
that cooperation without which teaching is impossible. 

Dignified speech and conduct will not be attained without 
years of cultivation. The manner of speech acquired in child- 
hood is very difficult to change, or if one escapes from it by 
education, it is likely to take him again unawares in a time of 
weakness or excitement. The Galilean fisherman whose speech 
betrayed him even after the great Master had trained him for 
apostleship, was not the last to find that a brief normal course 
cannot prevent trouble from the old habits of expression. 'No 
college study can assure one that he will not backslide to the 
phrases of his childhood. The using of slang sayings leaves one 
at a loss for proper forms of language. He comes to his mature 
years with such a small vocabulary of proper speech that he 
must continue to supplement it with the current slang. The 
habit of swearing is properly condemned by all thoughtful 
people, but there is not so much difficulty in leaving off this 
habit as in learning to express thoughts effectively without the 
use of those senseless expletives commonly considered harmless 
bywords. The use of superlative forms of expression, and a 
habit of overstating whatever is reported, are kindred errors 
that cannot be corrected too early. There are those whose repu- 
tation for being good talkers rests largely on their felicity in 
making a good story, generally supplementing it, perhaps, by 
many statements, " important if true," which are merely con- 
clusions jumped at by a process of guessing from data furnished 



TEE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 35 

largely by the imagination. One who is to teach needs long 
practice in selecting the right words for the telling of the 
" truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The teacher 
needs the habit of wise reserve on doubtful doctrines and par- 
tisan questions. This is his best defense against the dogmatic 
spirit which threatens to take possession of him. He must un- 
derstand that on some subjects, any man's opinion, if not so 
good as another's, is at least entitled to the utmost respect. It 
is not wise for him to be a partisan now of this belief and then 
of that belief, when he shows plainly that he has been wrong 
in at least one of his contentions, and he does not convince that 
he was right in taking either position. Again, there is the cul- 
tivation of pleasant and kindly tones, the suppression of boister- 
ous tendencies, and the acquisition of the ability to be a good 
listener. These cautions do not forbid his engaging in the light- 
est and most cheerful and trivial commonplace talk on the proper 
occasions. Only with long years of practice can the teacher be 
prepared to unbridle as well as to bridle his tongue. 

An exemplary life should be lived from earliest years as a 
preparation to teach. The recklessness in youth that is some- 
times excused as the mere sowing of "wild oats," cannot fail 
to grow troublesome tares in the harvest of the teacher. The 
poison which the mere conversation of the vile pours into the 
mind can never be completely eradicated ; the sense of nice dis- 
tinction is dulled by it for all time. Persons are sometimes 
said to show great strength in breaking away from evil habits; 
their strength would have been greater by successfully resisting 
the first invitation to indulgence. He who has had the expe- 
rience of quitting the use of alcohol or tobacco is liable to think 
he can just as well quit again. He stands as an example leading 



36 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



others to take the chances he has taken. If not this danger, there 
is the worry lest the past become known. There is, too, the 
greater probability of a temptation to the old error, the sugges- 
tion that once again it can be repeated and concealment con- 
tinned. To have risen from a fall in apparent safety is well, 
never to have fallen is better. 

A habitually buoyant energy preeminently needs a whole life 
of careful building for a teacher. He should have an exuber- 
ance of spirit sufficient always to show a reserve force. There 
should be no yielding to depression and discouragement in the 
presence of difficulty, no ebullition of temper in the failure of 
patience and self-control, no exposing of weak defenses to sud- 
den surprises. We may well say that no one is sufficient for all 
these things, but if so, we must agree that the nearest approach 
will be made toward this unfailing strength by one who has, 
from his earliest years, taken no backward steps but has pressed 
steadily forward toward the highest attainment. 

4. General Training for a Teacher. 

There are many varieties of education and experience whose 
importance to the teacher mi£*ht be thoughtlessly overlooked by 
one who has decided to enter the teaching profession. What has 
been said on the preceding subjects refers chiefly to considera- 
tions that should guide those who are selecting for the child his 
future vocation. We must remember, however, that the Ameri- 
can youth comes sooner or later to make choices for himself. 
Many of the foregoing considerations will not occur to him 
when he chooses teaching as a life work, but he will bethink 
himself as to what he can do in the way of active preparation. 
He has now come to the period when he wants to take the short- 



TEE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 37 

est road to salary-earning. He needs to be reminded that the 
attainment of strength in a great many lines should precede his 
specializing in any one line. Powers that he may need in later 
life are likely to suffer atrophy if not exercised. The fishes 
whose eyes have lost their functions through years of life in 
some dark cavern where there was little seeing to be done, have 
found little chance for existence when the current has borne 
them out to be the prey oi iully developed fishes under common 
conditions. The person who goes into life as a teacher should 
get a more comprehensive training than what is strictly de- 
manded for his environment as teacher. 

A broad scholarship should be the possession of every teacher. 
No matter what grade of pupils he is instructing, no matter 
what specialty he thinks will give him a limited field, he needs 
to know something of the regions of learning his pupils are to 
explore after they have left him, and what are the relations of 
his specialty with the other groups of specialties and with edu- 
cation in general. Other things being equal, a college graduate 
would be chosen as a primary teacher or as an instructor in 
farming, rather than one who has not so broad an education. 
Nor is it to be supposed that a college course contains all one 
needs to know of general training. There was a time when the 
college graduate approached much nearer the standard of liberal 
culture. Each new year introduces some new development in 
civilization, and he who is to be a leader must have the ability 
to keep to the front. Inventions are made in so many fields 
that he who understands but one field will know but few of 
them. Systematic general study must be continued, even beyond 
the completion of what is called a general education. 



38 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

A special study of the common branches should be made. 
These constitute the great body of work for the beginners, who 
are the most numerous class of pupils. These branches should 
be carefully reviewed in the elementary portions, and should be 
studied in their more advanced phases. The grammar schools, 
in which is done the last work on these subjects in the usual 
school course, rise no higher than the preparation for admission 
to a high school, which is hurrying its classes to a preparation m 
other subjects required for admission to college. The higher 
studies do not give a teaching knowledge of the common 
branches, but they do give a mental power that can take a 
better grasp of what has already been covered, and that can see 
the reasons for much that was previously a mere matter of 
statement. For instance, mensuration in arithmetic should not 
be taught by one who has not seen through the subject in a light 
somewhat more luminous than he can receive in a grammar 
school. The effort to enrich grammar-school courses of study 
is tending, moreover, to diminish the extent of instruction in 
the old-time subjects. Topics in grammar and arithmetic, for 
instance, have recently fallen into disuse in common schools 
solely on the ground of lack of time. The teacher cannot afford 
to be shallow -in the subjects of general knowledge. If he does, 
everybody who sounds him will be able to touch bottom. If the 
teacher must go to his work without such a broad education as 
we have described, he should at least go deep into the common 
branches, and should take a thorough review of them under com- 
petent instructors, and there is the greater need that his instruct- 
ors shall be competent if he is to teach without extended study 
in many directions. A professional knowledge of the common 
branches is more universally needed by teachers than is any 
other educational attainment. 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 39 

Accomplishments that will entertain company should be ac- 
quired by every one who is to be as valuable a member of society 
as the teacher should be. The teacher should be able to meet his 
pupils and his patrons pleasantly in a social way. Such gather- 
ings feel a woful lack of proper diversion. In the absence of 
what commands general approval, questionable amusements are 
likely to be offered. In a sense, the teacher is under no more 
obligation than others to furnish entertainment, where he is a 
guest, but if in his presence there is a scarcity of the things 
that are " of good report," he is likely to intensify the discomfort 
of that scarcity. Fortunate is the teacher whose presence in a 
social gathering shows the company that there is, in pleasant 
personal conversation, in anecdote and readings, in good music 
and animated yet unobjectionable games, enough of diversion to 
give everybody a happy occasion without over-exertion, and with- 
out the temptation to unseasonable hours. 

Practical citizenship is a duty that one should learn to dis- 
charge before he considers that he has made his general prepara- 
tion for teaching. This suggestion is not necessarily a call to 
participation in partisan politics. The teacher who is entitled 
to vote in the caucuses and primaries of political parties should 
learn how to use there his individual influence for what, if not 
his ideal, is the least objectionable of the alternatives offered, 
but he should not allow himself to be drawn into the struggles 
which spring more from desire for victory as a personal matter 
than from devotion to any party or policy. If he works for the 
election of a friend, let the campaigning for him be waged as 
fair and open warfare. But there are other respects in which 
one may learn to do good work as a citizen. Every community 
needs a promotion of non-partisan enterprises. Such work in 



40 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

voluntary organizations as is done by study clubs and literary 
societies, such municipal matters as street and park improve- 
ment, such far-reaching interests as the good-roads movement, 
are worthy fields for both sexes, and will give a valuable ap- 
prenticeship to those who wish to become master workmen in the 
domain of the teacher. 

Self-sacrificing work in the line of voluntary charitable or- 
ganizations, or in the missionary and evangelizing labors of the 
church, or in personal work among those who need help and 
reformation, will develop a side of the nature which should be 
developed in every teacher. Not alone in the class-room, but in 
personal conferences either for discipline or for counsel, the 
teacher deals with the whole range of human experience and 
emotion. He needs to know how to help without humiliating, 
how to reform without discouraging, how to lead to the higher 
life without violating the proprieties of a layman's position. 
This is the field in which the teacher does his most delicate and 
yet his most important work. If he has not learned to do it 
without trespassing upon the most cold reserve, on the one hand, 
and without falling short on the other of giving the fullest sym- 
pathy and service invited by sorrow and suffering, whatever he 
does is likely to reach the head only, while he who wins in this 
world must enlist the heart. 

Some avocation, aside from the vocation of teaching, and 
not at all of the same nature, may very properly be possessed 
and pursued. The teacher is not to be that kind of an amateur 
sometimes described as " Jack of all trades/' He should recog- 
nize the fact that many things can be better done by others than 
by himself. He would make himself ridiculous if he attempted 
to do that which he could not do well. He will, on the other 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 41 



hand, command respect and even admiration by showing that he 
can do something of worthy achievement that is not connected 
with teaching. If, however, this should be done for the mere 
purpose of securing admiration, the opposite feeling would be 
awakened. The valid reason for choosing alternation with an 
avocation different from one's vocation is the fact that rest is 
secured thereby, or rather, perhaps, that weariness is avoided. 
An employment that would engage no different set of faculties 
would keep the teacher continuing the worry of his regular work 
through all his waking hours. The teacher should not take as 
the side line a sedentary occupation or one that gives too little 
change from the regular work, as would needlework or author- 
ship. Something that calls for the movement of the whole body, 
or that gives results without a constant struggle, affords the best 
avocation. The care of plants or of animals is a good type of 
outside employment. One other consideration to keep in mind 
in perfecting one's self in some avocation, is the fact that he may 
sometime need to turn away from his vocation. The Apostle 
Paul worked at tent-making for a time after he had begun his 
career as a teacher. It is not probable that he had mastered this 
trade with a view to its being a life work, but rather in the light 
of an educational experience, as an emperor in modern times is 
said to have learned the trade of bookbinding. The view pre- 
sented here concerning the teacher is that he should have much 
more than a minimum preparation for the work, and that he 
may be most a teacher who is more than a teacher. 

5. Special Training for a Teacher. 

What has been suggested thus far is not enough to prepare 
one for teaching. To begin teaching without special prepara- 



42 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

tion for that business is unfair to the teacher, who is deprived 
of valuable helps to success; an imposition on his employers, 
who are paying their money for what they are not getting ; and 
a crime against the pupils, who are lifelong sufferers from such 
professional malpractice. No one should allow himself to begin 
teaching before he has taken special training. 

The professional studies are the gateway to a professional 
training. The history of education brings to the teacher the 
benefit of the race's experience. He needs the help of an in- 
structor to interpret this experience for guidance and to adapt 
it to use under the circumstances of the present. Psychology 
furnishes knowledge of the human mind which, presented to 
the teacher with explanations as to the bearing of this knowledge 
upon the true philosophy of education, will enable him to choose 
wisely what to teach and how to teach it. There is an elabora- 
tion of method supposed to be based on this philosophy of edu- 
cation, and made simple enough that he who runs may read, but 
a candidate for the position of teacher is not likely to read to 
the extent of understanding these methods unless he has the 
help of others. There is an organization of school which is 
shaped by legislation, and is controlled by constituted author- 
ities, and he who would work in this system must familiarize 
himself with the statutes on the subject; there is an art of 
school management which sets forth in a concrete and compre- 
hensive way the means of reaching the best results in accordance 
with all this guidance of history, these principles of philosophy, 
the suggestions of method and the requirements of legislation. 
He who is to teach should first get the knowledge that comes 
from all this special study. 



TEE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 43 

Supervised practice gives the surest guaranty of success that 
can be given in advance. To illustrate the conclusions of study, 
to correct possible errors, and to give deftness in doing the work 
of the schoolroom, this training is invaluable. No general re- 
view of subjects to be taught, no, not even a study of them with 
reference to teaching them, can give the training that is obtained 
effectively in actually having the experience of teaching them 
when both teacher and pupils are safe from fatal mistakes be- 
cause there is guidance. No playing of teaching with a class 
of one's equals who are expected to feign the conditions of child- 
hood, can serve this purpose. He who sees teaching done under 
typical conditions and under critical analysis always learns 
either how to do or how not to do; he who teaches under the 
guidance of alert critics escapes the formation of bad habits 
which might otherwise cling to him through life. 

How and ivhere this training can be obtained is the inquiry 
raised by the enumeration of different kinds of special training 
for a teacher. Colleges and universities are offering constantly 
increasing facilities for some of this work. They are not only 
presenting the science and the history of education as culture 
studies, but they are in many instances conducting model classes 
in the elementary subjects, thus pursuing the laboratory method 
as truly as in any other department of their work. The college 
course of general preparation thus includes, as work counted 
for graduation, much of special preparation. Whatever may be 
the extent or the limit of previous professional training, those 
who join in reading-circles find them a means by which teachers 
in the same neighborhood can help each other. While this kind 
of help may seem a case of the blind's leading the blind, even the 
blindest may, nevertheless, hold one another out of the ditch. 



44 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

Teachers by studying together get guidance from the best that 
can be written and said in the line of the teacher's needs. 
Teachers' meetings are more likely than reading-circles to lack 
helpfulness, but they are also more likely to awaken enthusiasm 
for professional attainment. Besides, there is a sense of respon- 
sibility that comes to him who has the duty of defending posi- 
tions in a public discussion, and he will be likely to examine the 
grounds of his theory and practice as under no other circum- 
stances. Teachers' institutes are often only a protracted meet- 
ing of teachers and those wishing to teach, but professional 
instruction is given to a larger number of individuals in this 
way than in any other. Practically all the teachers of the com- 
mon schools in a community attend the institute. There is 
much systematic instruction furnished in them by both the 
lecture and the text-book method. Vacation schools for ad- 
vanced teachers secure an attendance that gives great promise 
for the progress of the profession. By means of these schools, 
teachers who feel the insufficiency of their professional training, 
and yet feel that they cannot take leave of absence from their 
positions for even a year, will get, nevertheless, through the 
accretions of several summers, a great store of strength. 

The normal school, whether supported by city, county or state, 
devotes itself the whole year through exclusively to the training 
of teachers. It offers a course of special training ranking in 
length and efficiency with that given by the medical colleges for 
their specialty, and works on the not unreasonable theory that 
those who are to minister to the mind need as complete technical 
training as do those whose care is the body. It therefore be- 
hooves the normal school to stand as the exponent of the best 
that has been established in the science and art of teaching; 



THE TEACHER'S PREPARATION. 45 

to collect in its course whatever has been found of value in 
other and more limited means of professional training; to co- 
ordinate and organize and round out so that in doing all that is 
done by each of the less specialized and less elaborate means of 
professional training, it shall do more than is done by any other 
means for the special preparation of teachers. 

The teacher who brings to his work the strength and the train- 
ing suggested by what has been said thus far in our discussion, 
may very safely enter with joy upon the management of the 
school entrusted to his care, and may feel that he has as good 
chance of success as can be found in any occupation; may, in 
short, go about his work with that pleasure and confidence and 
ability which will make his work with the young an inspiration 
and a blessing. In considering these elements of the teacher's 
strength, we have seen what can be done for the securing of good 
teachers for the schools, and have thus made a study of the 
requisite for school management, that comes first in order in 
both time and importance. 



II. PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR 
SCHOOL. 



1. Certificates. 

The law in force in the locality in which one purposes to 
teach will probably concern him, first of all, in the matter of 
the teachers' certificates. The statutes on the subject should be 
studied in connection with the points discussed here. 

We may properly raise first an inquiry as to the reason for re- 
quiring that teachers in the public schools shall have certificates. 
The hotel-keeper is not examined as to his ability to minister 
to our bodily wants. The fact that the lawyer and the physi- 
cian must be licensed before they can practice does not furnish 
any more of a guide for the teacher than does the case of the 
grocer, who simply sells to each individual for himself. The 
civil-service examination is more nearly on the same plane as 
the teachers'. The public treasury must be guarded against the 
inroads of the incompetent and the inefficient. 

The area or the extent of the municipal or political unit for 
which the teacher's certificate is valid must necessarily be re- 
stricted by law. Not only does the authority of the certificating 
officers require, in order to prevent confusion, a legal limit as to 
territory covered, but the difference in educational standards in 
various parts of the country makes such limitation necessary. 
The furnishing of the same questions for examination in all 
parts of the state will not warrant the making of a state certifi- 

(46) 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 47 

cate by each local board of examiners, for the standard of grad- 
ing would vary so as to prevent the success of the plan, even if 
all the schools in the state maintained the same standards for 
their teachers. The greater the diversity of schools for which a 
certificate is valid, the more extended and strict should be the 
requirements for obtaining the certificate. 

The time limit for teachers' certificates is, in many cases, a 
necessity. If the candidate has not demonstrated, in actual 
practice, his ability along those lines that the examination can- 
not test, a certificate given on examination should cover only 
enough time to allow the test of experience. Even after proof 
of present power is made, the question whether one should have 
a life certificate depends on whether he is likely to keep himself 
up to his best effort, and is clearly able to advance as the stand- 
ard of his profession advances. 

The examining authority, whether it be £ board or an indi- 
vidual, should manifestly have the qualifications necessary to 
the wisest decision concerning the ability of candidates, and 
should have no interests that would influence its action against 
the highest good of the schools. Both the preparation of the 
questions and the estimating of the answers, whether entrusted 
to the same or to different agencies, should receive the utmost 
care. 

A minimum age for the certificate should be fixed by law. 
If as high as it should be made to make a safe general rule, it 
will doubtless compel many worthy young persons to wait. It is 
not wise to place the limit early enough to accommodate the 
most precocious. If the examining authority should discrimi- 
nate on account of age, candidates would feel more aggrieved 
at questionable exclusions than at the barrier of an absolute age 



48 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

limit. The minimum age for teaching is generally so far below 
the maximum age of attendance as student, that teachers fre- 
quently are younger than some of those they are to teach. If 
the common schools give instruction enough to prepare for ex- 
amination to teach in them, their students in one year are likely 
to become their teachers in the next. The novices thus admitted 
to the work of teaching compete with experienced teachers for 
places, and frequently displace with their temporary services 
persons who would otherwise have made teaching a permanent 
business. r An age limit well up toward the years of majority 
would give ample time for preparation, and would diminish the 
number engaging in teaching as a mere stepping-stone to some 
other business. 

The experience required for the higher grades of certificates 
should rank according to the certificate. The teacher who has 
filled with apparent success a single engagement, and that per- 
haps without expert inspection, has not demonstrated that he 
is worthy of the highest certificate. Even long years of plod- 
ding experience may have served merely to confirm him in bad 
habits ; a short time under conditions that really test him may 
give much more of promise for the future. 

The diploma of a graduate from a higher school is not evi- 
dence of fitness to teach, and therefore should not be recognized 
ns a teacher's certificate, unless the course of study provides, 
or a supplementary examination reveals, special training m 
teaching. One who has been engaged for a long time in studies 
above the elementary schools needs a special bringing down to 
their studies before he graduates with a diploma which is a 
certificate to teach. 

The endorsement of a teacher's certificate to make it valid 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 49 

when he removes to another part of the country should not be 
expected, as a rule. Judicial proceedings in one state must re- 
ceive full faith and credit in every other, by the terms of the 
national constitution, but whatever may be the interpretation 
of that requirement, there can be no ground for expecting any 
general interchange of state certificates for teachers, much less 
of county or of city certificates. The schools cannot be brought 
to such uniformity throughout the country as would warrant- 
such expectation. The most that can be expected is that the 
certificating authorities in each state may have some option to 
exercise in the cases of the individual teacher when they have 
gathered a reasonable amount of reliable information. The 
privilege of renewing or extending a teacher's certificate should 
carry with it the making: of some investigation as to what 
strength has been developed or demonstrated that had not ap- 
peared when the certificate was first issued, else whv should not 
the original issue of the certificate have covered the time which 
the renewal is to cover ? The power to revoke a certificate should 
always be present to act if the possessor should be or become 
clearly unworthy to hold it. The highest educational authoritv 
of the state might properly have the power to revoke a certifi- 
cate that is granted to an unworthy candidate by a local author- 
ity. There is, however, in each community, a distinct increase 
of the sense of responsibility from the necessity of bearing the 
results of home-made mistakes. The lapsing of life certificates 
in case of the holder's ceasing to teach, is a proper provision. 
There is need not only of a definite statement as to the maximum 
number of years one may stop teaching without losing his cer- 
tificate, but also as to how much teaching one must do in a year 



50 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



to prevent the counting of that year as a contribution to this 
maximum. 

Examinations should not be shunned by worthy candidates for 
a position. When the teacher knows the legal requirements he 
is to meet for the securing of a certificate, he should accept the 
situation gracefully, and make as little trouble as possible for 
those whose duty it is to give the examination. It should be 
remembered that examiners do not usually receive much re- 
muneration for this part of their work ; the teacher and not the 
examiner is the party who is to be accommodated, and the 
teacher should therefore be the more gracious. The worthy can- 
didate does not fear a fair test. The inconvenience of a special 
journey for the time and place of the examination is the most 
serious part of his annoyance. If the candidate is to do credit 
to himself, he will not allow the fatigue and worry of the jour- 
ney to reach into the hours of the examination. It behooves 
him to appear at his best, and he should seek to meet the examin- 
ers under favorable circumstances, and with an introduction that 
will secure attention, not for the purpose of influencing them 
improperly, but that they may be sure of a worthy personality 
back of the name that they are to consider for insertion in the 
certificate. 

2. Engaging a School. 

When the teacher is sure of a certificate, the way is open for 
him to engage any school for which the certificate is valid. He 
has probably had, before seeking the certificate, some assurance 
of finding a school to which it will make him eligible. If he 
does not already have an acquaintance with members of the 
board, he should enlist, first of all, the help of mutual acquaint- 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 51 

ances of himself and the board. Any one will find pleasure in 
bringing together for a contract parties who are able to meet 
satisfactorily each other's wants. The teacher need not hesi- 
tate to raise inquiry throughout the whole circle of his acquaint- 
ances, as to whether they know of probable vacancies that he 
could satisfactorily fill. 

Personal interviews are likely to be most influential in secur- 
ing election. The candidate himself should seek a personal con- 
ference ; the board may very properly require him to visit them 
before he is considered, and the board cannot be expected to 
waive this requirement unless they have positive assurance from 
some trustworthy endorser who knows thoroughly both the can- 
didate and the place. Even with such endorsement, an inter- 
view gives to both parties a feeling of greater confidence in 
making the contract. 

The expense of a journey by the teacher or of a visit to the 
teacher by a representative of the board is often such a neces- 
sary outlay for the safety of the school as to justify the giving 
of legal authority to the board for making payment from school 
funds. Boards should not ask teachers to make a long journey 
for an interview without first doing all that can be done by 
correspondence, and whenever the teacher is asked to make 
such visit, he may properly raise the question whether the 
board can provide for the necessary expense. Rather than 
sacrifice both the time and the money, the teacher could better 
afford to pay the cost of a visit to him by some one authorized 
to make the contract. A reasonable agreement would be the 
sharing of the expense; but whatever the agreement is, no 
payment should be conditioned on the employment of the 
teacher. If no contract is made, both should share the loss. 



52 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



There should be no special payment made by either party be- 
cause a bargain has been closed in which both should be the 
gainers. Candidates who go from place to place seeking to dis- 
pose of their services as a traveling salesman seeks a market 
for his goods, lower the dignity of the teacher's profession, and 
in thus making uninvited calls on school boards, spend their 
money in a sort of gambling on chances. Boards anxious for 
the best teachers are not likely to receive favorably such peri- 
patetic candidates. 

Recommendations should be used discreetly. Teachers often 
make the mistake of submitting too many written recommenda- 
tions. Boards receive the impression that almost any one can 
£et as many written recommendations as he wants. A letter 
from a person eminent in any sphere will secure attention in 
proportion to the interest the board may feel in the writer, but 
the question whether it will materially help in securing election 
should depend on what the writer can say positively as to the 
candidate's worth. Bather than a weak letter from a distin- 
guished acquaintance, better present a positive endorsement 
from a person whose closer knowledge of teacher and school 
will give confidence in his opinion. The sending of a great 
number of recommendations produces an unfavorable impres- 
sion more frequently than a favorable one. If a board receives 
a large number of letters supporting a candidate, there is 
likely to be a feeling of annoyance for which the candidate is 
held responsible. It sometimes happens that a careful school 
board becomes over-impressed with weighty recommendations, 
and concludes that the candidate is really too valuable a teacher 
for them, and would be dissatisfied with their work and likely 
soon to have a call to some higher position. The teacher would 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 53 

better say to his supporters as Cromwell, sitting for a picture, 
said to the artist, " Paint me as I am." An applicant should 
not expect that a board will return recommendations. If the 
letters are addressed to the board, they are not the candidate's 
property, unless the writer has sent him a copy. It should be 
understood that garbled copies, quoting only a part of what is 
said, or reporting as a general recommendation what was writ- 
ten for a particular position or some special kind of work, are 
as dishonest as a forged recommendation would be. The can- 
didate should file complete copies of general recommendations, 
or, if authorized to do so, of any others whose originals are in 
his hands, and should of course offer to submit the originals if 
desired. If the board will not trust the copies, they will not be 
likely to favor the candidate on the evidence of even original 
recommendations. Better than a large number of recommenda- 
tions from which to file copies, is the assurance of influential 
people that they would be willing to write favorably if named 
as references. A full statement of the training and experience 
of the candidate should be given in tabular form, if extensive 
enough to make a table. This will enable boards to select their 
own sources of information, and to avoid the suspicion that 
they are restricted to ex parte testimony. The candidate who 
prints a circular giving what is suggested above, and perhaps 
embellishes it with a picture of himself, is likely to give the 
impression that he is in the candidating business too extensively. 
He would better not seek more places than he can supply with 
information and recommendations by the use of script and type- 
writer. It is not wise, either, to send a photograph unless it is 
specially requested. If a friend chances to have a good picture, 
it might be submitted casually, without its having been re- 



54 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



quested. There are many who feel that a person's showing his 
own picture without being asked to do so, is prompted by per- 
sonal vanity. 

Teachers' agencies assist a candidate who registers with 
them and agrees to remunerate them for their services. In 
addition to informing the teacher of a position they think he 
might seek, they sometimes exert influence to secure his elec- 
tion. The managers of many of these agencies use good judg- 
ment and attain great skill in selecting proper candidates, and 
therefore secure the confidence of school boards, but they can 
do only a small part of the bringing together of teachers and 
boards that is necessary for the ordinary positions at a time 
when the engagements for the following year are being regu- 
larly made. The teacher who seeks an engagement at the 
season when most places are already filled, needs the help of 
an agency or of a school that is likely to receive inquiries for 
the filling of unexpected vacancies. The teacher who seeks a 
position in some special kind of work, for which there are open- 
ings in only a few places in the country, will find the agencies 
at all seasons of the year the most efficient assistance he can 
expect, outside of the schools that are widely known as prepar- 
ing teachers for this specialty. 

Indiscriminate applications for places do harm. After what 
has been said as to the methods of learning about schools that 
desire teachers, and of laying before the boards information 
they should have concerning teachers that desire schools, a 
word of caution should be given lest teachers apply promis- 
cuously, if not regardless of whether there is a vacancy, — 
at least regardless of whether they are likely to get the posi- 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 55 

tion, or to want it after they do get it. The first of these 
mistakes might do no harm, except to the reputation of the 
candidate; the second might cause him very great embarrass- 
ment, and also give endless trouble to the board that considers 
the application. There is nothing improper in a teacher's 
applying for more than one school at a time, with the inten- 
tion of accepting the position that offers the greatest induce- 
ment, if he states distinctly how much time he would like in 
which to consider the offer if it should be made, — a state- 
ment that would, however, seem presumptuous unless he has 
previously held some of the positions he is considering. He 
may very well seek several places without any reservation as 
to acceptance, if he will hold himself ready to accept promptly 
the place that first notifies him of election. 

A suitable school should be conscientiously sought. In de- 
ciding what place he would accept, he should consider the 
mutual adaptability of himself and the school. The beginner 
who has attended no school except a rural school would better 
begin his teaching in a rural school if he has not enough of 
urbanity to adapt himself to urban society. The city-bred 
would work at a disadvantage among the farmers if he did 
not appear sufficiently at home among them to escape the dan- 
ger of ridicule from lack of familiarity with their surroundings. 
There may be conditions peculiar to one school or one teacher 
that will constitute a sufficient barrier to an engagement. 
Possibly a prejudice, entirely without justification, is likely, 
nevertheless, to prove insuperable. There may be so many 
students that a beginner in teaching would be hopelessly be- 
wildered, while in a smaller school the same beginner could be 
sure of himself from the very first. There may be conditions 



56 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

that would endanger the health of the teacher, or that would 
otherwise make it impossible for him to succeed, and that would 
possibly end his career in the profession, if he should take some 
particular school. The teacher should take care not to become 
a candidate for a position that he would be likely to wish he 
had not taken. He ought, at least, never to accept a position 
if it seems at all likely that he would better remain without a 
position than to take it, or if there is any prospect that either 
party to the contract will be dissatisfied before the term the 
contract is to cover has been completed. 

3. Contract. 

Neither teacher nor school board should be content with a 
mere oral agreement. Such an assent as is sometimes given 
by each member of the board when personally visited, even 
though it be a clear statement that he is willing if the others 
are, does not constitute an agreement. If accepted as a con- 
tract, there would be great difficulty in proving what are its 
terms. Even if the entire board should assemble, a written 
record would be the least that would be safe. The favorable 
expressions of a conference in which there is the making of 
proposals and counter-proposals, the statements of what could 
probably be done or what might be granted, under certain 
conditions, are likely to be fixed in the mind only as far as 
desired by each party. The only safe proceeding is the inter- 
change of some sort of signed memorandum, clearly stating the 
contract. This can be made most satisfactorily at the time 
the agreement is reached, and if not formulated then, is in 
great danger of being postponed indefinitely. Amicable con- 
cessions on doubtful points will be made much more gracefully 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL, 57 

when the whole negotiation is fresh in mind, and before any 
irrelevant personal misunderstandings have arisen. If a con- 
tract is announced before its terms are written out, specifica- 
tions asked by either party will probably be regarded by the 
other as demands for undue advantage. The teacher would do 
well to have duplicate contracts ready to present if the board 
or their representative should request postponement to provide 
them. This suggestion must not make the teacher so aggressive 
on this point as to give offense. If the teacher has the written 
statement of the proper officer, or even such an officer's telegram 
showing that he has been duly elected at a stated salary, it 
may be safely assumed that general usage and the established 
rules of the school will be the guides on other points; but 
these guides may, nevertheless, be difficult to understand. Even 
when there is abundant evidence of a contract, the writing out 
of the details will serve to clear up points that would be over- 
looked if a general agreement had been merely taken for 
granted. * 

The requirements of the statutes, and the tenor of court 
decisions that affect the validity of the contract, should be 
known by the teacher before he makes his contract. Must he 
have a valid certificate covering the entire time from the date 
of the contract to the completion of the term? Was the con- 
tract authorized by the board at a legal meeting or in any 
other manner that would bind the school? Has the board a 
right to make a contract for a term to begin after the expiration 
of the term of one or more of its members? Would the fact 
that as many as half of them go out of office before the end 
of the contract nullify the contract? Are powers given to the 



58 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



annual meeting of voters which would enable that meeting to 
prevent the employment of any particular teacher, and which 
would thus put a limitation upon the power of the board? 

Doubtful points would better go into the contract, even 
though covered by law, if there is a possibility that some may 
not understand the law. Is the law clear as to what consti- 
tutes a school month, and is there a prescribed length of school 
day ? Is there a clearly understood statement in the law as to 
whether the board shall hire the janitor, in the absence of any 
contract to the contrary ? Could the teacher draw the regular 
salary for a supply engaged by himself in event of necessary 
absence? Another question on which any dispute would do 
great harm is the question what holidays may be expected by 
the teacher while his salary goes on just the same as if he were 
teaching. Are there holidays the teacher may take without the 
consent of the board ? There may be questions as to whether the 
school is to be closed on election day, for instance, to use the 
building as a voting-place. Provision should be specified for the 
care of the building, if it is to be used as a place for evening 
meetings not under the control of the teacher. These are some 
of the points that should be considered in making a contract. 

Extra requirements are sometimes proposed of such a na- 
ture as to bind the teacher in a way that humiliates him. Such 
a requirement as that he attend certain meetings of teachers 
should not be put into the contract unless it is proposed that 
he close school for them and still draw pay. His professional 
spirit should be trusted for the keeping up of voluntary attend- 
ance at such gatherings within reach, outside of school hours. 
The teacher should not be asked to agree that vacations caused 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 59 

by epidemics, or other causes beyond his control, shall stop his 
pay. If he could be released to find work elsewhere, that would 
be very different from waiting around with nothing to do. 
The contract should not undertake to say specifically what of- 
fenses may cause the dismissal of the teacher. The law de- 
scribes the requirement as closely as the contract should, and 
the courts may be appealed to for determining whether any 
offense that may be committed is sufficient to justify dismissal. 
No agreement need increase the power of the board for sum- 
mary dismissal. If they decide to dismiss the teacher, they 
should be ready to try the case in court on its merits. 

Canceling the contract should be a contingency anticipated. 
The teacher sometimes winces at a clause allowing either party 
to cancel the contract on giving some specified notice, perhaps 
thirty days. The canceling of a contract by giving notice with- 
out allowing the other party to judge of the validity of the 
reason, is more likely to accommodate the teacher than the 
board. The board should have some safeguard; as, for in- 
stance, if the building should be burned and the school should 
be discontinued, the board should not be compelled to continue 
the salary the whole term. The teacher, in like manner, would 
not expect to be held very long to service if some accident dis- 
abled him. The teacher is much more likely than the board 
to ask release from the contract because a better bargain is 
possible. When the board starts school for the year, it does 
not wish to be bothered with the getting of another teacher. 
Teachers, on the other hand, frequently ask release, the only 
reason in most cases being the chance of going, during the school 
year, to a position more desirable than would be likely to offer 
at other times. If school boards sought to cancel contracts on 



60 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

the same grounds there would be bitter complaint. The school 
really suffers more from the loss of a good teacher than the 
teacher can suffer from missing the chance of going to a better 
school. Teachers who do not have in their contracts the clause 
for canceling on a given length of notice, should not think of 
asking release to any other position during the period of the 
contract. Teachers should appreciate business principles in 
these matters. A contract should protect both parties equally, 
and should bind both parties equally. 

4. Learning About School. 

Conferences with the school board give the teacher some- 
thing of the information he needs preparatory to beginning his 
teaching. He should take care not to embarrass them with 
questions hard for them to answer. Different phases of the 
school will interest different members. Conversation will reveal 
what each is trying to do, and also what each will be ready to 
do for the future. For any early innovations the teacher wishes 
to introduce, he must secure the support of the majority of 
the board; he should also secure the acquiescence of all. He 
should also bear in mind that the members of the board may 
not wish to give him much of their time and attention, and 
that they may become prejudiced against him if he comes to 
them with a large number of inquiries and propositions soon 
after he is elected. Boards that will be prompt to do business 
when the time comes may not care to consider it in advance 
Ways should be found by the teacher for preparing the board 
to receive favorably any recommendation he is to make. This 
does not mean influencing them by any improper means. A 
suggestion that objectionable management of the board must 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 61 



have been resorted to by a superintendent who had, during 
forty years in the same place, never been refused on his positive 
recommendation, was answered by him with the remark that he 
was a man of some matrimonial experience, but no one had 
ever accused him of any impropriety because he never pro- 
posed without first knowing what the answer was going to be. 
This discussion will not attempt to describe just how the teacher 
is to learn in advance what would be the answer of his board 
to any proposal he may think of making. 

The inspection of the school building and grounds should 
be an early care, for the purpose of seeing that everything is in 
good condition for the beginning of work. Some member or 
some committee of the board will join in the inspection, but 
the teacher will know better what to suggest if he has studied 
the conditions very carefully before he participates in this offi- 
cial tour. The teacher should direct attention to needed im- 
provements in such a way as to give the board members the 
satisfaction of suggesting the proper thing to be done. The 
new school year should reveal to the pupils when they return 
to their work a thorough cleaning and freshening of the build- 
ing and surroundings, even if there has not been a necessity 
or possibility of extensive repairs. The teacher will get, in 
his early visits to the school premises, information for his own 
guidance. Even the old text-books that have been left in the 
desks will show what has been taught. Such matters as the 
entrances and windows, and the arrangement of furniture, will 
influence his plans of organization. Early and close inspec- 
tion of all the material appliances of the school will give the 
teacher great assistance in getting ready for his work. 



62 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

The records of the school should be thoroughly examined. 
They may consist of merely the legal reports and returns that 
have been required for drawing the teacher's salary and for 
obtaining the allotment of the school funds. These records 
may be difficult for the teacher to reach, and he may discover 
among the papers accessible nothing but some poorly kept 
registers and classbooks. He will make inquiry for everything 
of this kind that may be in existence but not readily found by 
him. The teacher should at least be able to discover from rec- 
ords what standard of promptness and regularity in attendance 
has been maintained. He needs to find, from the records, data 
to make the program and classification with which he is to 
begin. He will study the records of individual pupils, and will 
note what seems to be the tendency of different families, and 
will thus be advised what to encourage and what to suppress. 
The information that he will get from these records will, as he 
meets those who have known of the school, enable him to com- 
mend himself by his knowledge of what is to constitute their 
mutual interest, and will guide him also in seeking a further 
knowledge from personal interviews, and in deciding what 
course to take in many matters of school management. 

The previous teacher is the one individual who could give 
the new teacher most assistance. Circumstances may possibly 
hinder the opening of helpful communication if the vacancy 
in the place was not entirely of the previous teacher's making. 
Only in case the new teacher or his special friends may have 
been active in causing the vacancy, will he find the need of 
information from his predecessor specially embarrassing. It is 
possible that a sullen silence or a vigorous upbraiding may meet 
his first advances. Of the two, the latter is to be preferred by 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 53 

one who can hold his temper under the circumstances. There 
is very ancient authority for saying that an offender is helped 
to reform by hearing the blunt declaration, " Thou art the man." 
The person who feels aggrieved is not, however, in a position 
to give helpful reproof. He is likely to suspect in others the 
causes of his own undoing, when he should find them in himself. 
The new teacher who wants a favor is not in a position to cor- 
rect this tendency. If wrongly suspected, he is fortunate to 
get the chance to clear himself. The party who finds he has 
gone too far in his accusation of another is likely to reach soon 
a period of reflection in which he will desire to make amends, 
if nothing has been done to rekindle his wrath. In any event, 
he is likely to do less harm after freely expressing himself, 
provided the interview has not given new cause for offense. 
Whether the mediation of mutual acquaintances shall be se- 
cured for bringing about this interview, "depends largely on 
whether the opportunity comes sufficiently early. There is no 
need of covering this purely business conference under the forms 
of a social call. The difference or identity of sex in the two 
teachers will be considered in deciding what shall be the cir- 
cumstances. A part at least of the discussion between the 
two teachers should be in such quiet tones as not to compel the 
hearing by any third person. Whether the first meeting lends 
help to the new teacher or not is, after all, not of so much 
importance as is the opening of the way to proper relations for 
the future, and the preventing of a tendency to perpetuate a 
faction in the community. 

Patrons and pupils should be met as early as possible, but 
not in direct search for information nor by any such request 
for an interview as is proper in the case of the board or the 



64 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

previous teacher. The teacher will be on the alert to happen 
around when his presence will be most acceptable. He will not 
lower himself in the estimation of his patrons if he shows that 
he knows how to lend a neighborly hand in their employments. 
A good illustration is the case of a young man who found two 
of his patrons husking corn from the stalk with no one to take 
the "down row." He said he would just as so~on take a little 
exercise as not, and he stayed with them until the wagon was 
loaded, he managing, by taking extra ears from the inner row 
of one man for a while and then the other, to give an impres- 
sion of efficiency that they might not have realized for a long 
time if they had not seen him in their own sphere of action. 
Fortunate is the teacher who can do this sort of thing in such 
a way as to make only a good impression. The parents gen- 
erally, and the pupils always, will be glad to talk to the teacher 
about the school. A question of interest in this connection is 
the propriety of a teacher's taking the risk of becoming preju- 
diced by evil reports concerning those whom he is to teach, and 
the risk of becoming confused by conflicting testimony, some of 
which must necessarily be false. So far as the teacher's course 
in his school is concerned, he should be able to act more dis- 
creetly from having had these interviews. The persons who 
have told the bad about others falsely have revealed the bad in 
themselves truly. The teacher has, in this experience, merely 
the necessity of sifting the true from the false, as he will have 
in all his work, and the facts would better be discovered early 
than he take the risk of making mistakes because they are not 
known. He should form a prejudice in the literal sense of that 
word, but not in the usual unfair sense of decision with insuffi- 
cient information. 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 65 

5. Establishing Acquaintance and Standing. 

Under this head, we shall discuss some points that are im- 
plied, or, in a general way, included in the teacher's prepara- 
tion, and in the subjects of the previous paragraphs of this 
chapter. Our aim now is the cultivation of what has been 
planted, and the suggestion as to what should be the fruits 
from this planting and cultivation. The teacher has not, when 
he begins teaching a school, finished the things necessary out- 
side of the school for preparing himself to succeed. 

The teachers' meetings for the neighborhood — as, for in- 
stance, the county institute — may not seem to him likely to 
add to the preparation he has already made. He should, never- 
theless, attend them as a means of keeping in touch with those 
who are to make the educational sentiment of the community, 
and who are in a larg"e measure to make or mar his own local 
renutation. Those who have been teaching in a communitv 
represent the educational ideals of that community, and thev 
have an experience which will give valuable information to any 
one who associates himself with them. Let no new teacher, 
however thorough and comprehensive his previous preparation 
mav have been, imagine that his associating himself with the 
local teachers is desirable solely for the purpose of aiding them. 
Thev are able to help him more than he can hope to help them. 
A teacher likelv to have incorrect notions on this subject needs 
to be cautioned lest he be too ready to offer the results of his 
previous preparation. An actual occurrence of some years aero 
will illustrate. A teacher who had recently come into the 
neighborhood was visiting the geography class in the countv 
institute. He volunteered the suggestion that he had in his 



66 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

trunk an excellent outline on the subject under discussion. Ac- 
cepting the invitation to place it on the board for the next day's 
recitation, he declined in the presence of the class to explain 
the meaning of the outline. He defended the work on the 
board, notwithstanding his failure to understand it, saying it 
was all right because it was given in the school where he had 
been educated. The teachers of that county would properly 
feel, after this experience, that the new-comer would better 
have enrolled as an institute student than have offered to assist 
the instructor. There is a parable which would apply to the 
case of the new teacher at the teachers' meeting, and would 
suggest that he promptly seek one of the lower rooms when he 
comes as a stranger to the educational feast. 

Opportune interviews should be utilized by the teacher. 
Casual conversation in which he must participate outside of 
school or else make himself a sphinx, will influence his success 
in the school. He should be alert to get on proper terms with 
even the newest arrival. A favorable impression made o"n the 
pupil before he comes to school does much to insure his future 
cooperation with the teacher. An impression gained by the 
parent for himself will stand against reports that might other- 
wise lead him into antagonism toward the teacher and the 
school. When the time comes, as it will sooner or later, for 
some difference of opinion with the teacher, or some question 
as to policy, the patrons whose favorable acquaintance the 
teacher has made will at least exercise the charity of suspend- 
ing judgment, and will be the more likely not to engage with 
the children in damaging animadversions on the teacher's con- 
duct. The relations to be desired will, while they remove re- 
serve and stiffness, not go to the fullest extent of freedom and 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 67 

familiarity. The teacher should not be called by either the 
title of professor or the convenient first name, much less by 
any familiar nickname. The surname, with the ordinary Mr., 
Miss or Mrs., will usually suffice, but if necessary in order to 
distinguish from some one else in the community, the pupil 
should be led to give the initials or the correct first name of 
the teacher. The establishing of this custom in the community 
may be very difficult if the habit of speech prevailing is against 
it. The teacher cannot afford to show that he is greatly annoyed 
by persons who unintentionally address him in the tabooed 
terms, much less should he allow himself to be vexed by any 
who purposely disregard his preferences in these matters. The 
securing of proper cooperation in this, as in all the many items 
of voluntary assistance the teacher should obtain, depends upon 
his unfailing tact. There is a delicacy of touch which can 
bring harmony all the time, even though exercised constantly 
where there is the greatest possibility of producing distracting 
discord. 

Personal meetings with pupils and patrons are valuable to 
the teacher. In all his casual conferences, he may be gather- 
ing information that will assist him. The previous teacher's 
methods of managing the school and imparting instruction will 
be shown more clearly by additional side-lights here, even 
though in a kindly interview that teacher may tell all he 
thinks would be of interest, and tell all things just as he him- 
self sees them. The views of the neighborhood respecting 
school must, with all their misconceptions and prejudices, be 
considered by the teacher, and he will constantly find, in ad- 
ditional revelations of these views, data for readjusting his own 
plans. The combating of these views by direct argument and 



68 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

continual antagonism, is not always to be attempted. The 
teacher would not have time enough for that, if it were desirable 
to do so. There are many things in the community he cannot 
undertake to correct. He should sometimes not seem to see 
the things that would be supposed to annoy him if seen, and 
would, nevertheless, be beyond his power to control. 

Boasting and other indiscreet talk may be the undoing of a 
teacher. Saying too much is a worse thing than talking too 
little. The teacher is liable to feel that he needs to advertise 
himself. Whatever may be the success that other professions 
secure by trumpeting their own merits, whatever the increase 
of patronage that trade may win by proclaiming the excellence 
of what it offers for sale, the teacher has no need of any ad- 
vertisement to secure his school; he has already made his sale, 
and should busy himself in delivering what has been sold. The 
telling of what he has done can do no good now, but may raise 
false expectations as to what he will do. A tendency to boast 
leads one to seek honor by reporting his previous recommenda- 
tions, or telling what distinguished friends and relatives are 
his, but the yielding to this tendency is likely to hinder the work 
of the teacher. His battles would better be fought with smoke- 
less powder, and there is no shooting where this is more true 
than in the commonplace talk of the teacher. 

Friendships inclusive rather than exclusive are desirable. 
Special social relations soon begin for the newly arrived teacher. 
He is likely to feel that some persons must be kept at a dis- 
tance, even though they seek to be particularly friendly. He 
is impressed also with the desirability of being recognized by 
others in the community, who are supposed to be desirable 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 69 

associates. The teacher's close social relations are likely in 
the end to be established as are those of other people, by the 
community of interests that are discovered. People who enjoy 
the same amusements or take the same kind of recreation or 
possess the same tastes and therefore converse most interest- 
ingly with one another, are likely to spend some of their spare 
time together. The teacher should be able to find enough in 
common with all his patrons to make himself their very accepta- 
ble companion. This does not mean that he will lower his taste 
to a liking for what is most attractive to persons who choose 
low attractions, but it suggests that he can find in all some 
worthy common interest. The teacher needs to be the welcome 
companion of all whom he would help. If he should allow him- 
self to become the exclusive associate of a few, even though they 
may be the most honored of the community, he will, by so doing, 
diminish in some measure his efficiency. His kindness and 
good-will at least should be manifest toward all whom he is to 
help. 

The teacher s attitude toward organizations religious, politi- 
cal and social, will more or less affect his personal acquaintance, 
if not his official relations. He has rightfully the same option 
as any other citizen in his choice of such affiliations. As a 
matter of moral or civic duty, he is under the same obligations 
as other people to obey the dictates of his conscience or his 
judgment in promoting, ignoring or resisting the purposes of 
any or all such organizations. His duty as a teacher, viewed in 
the light here suggested, will be to find what can be done to 
contribute to the success of the schools without violating his 
own conscience. It may be recorded here as a reservation always 
to be understood in these discussions, that no one is supposed 



70 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



to monopolize the teaching function for any portion of the 
community, if at the same time he holds himself ready to sacri- 
fice to other interests his success as a teacher. When the teacher 
has accepted a school, it may be assumed that no such interests 
of his as we are now discussing will make it necessary for him 
to jeopardize his success. The person who asks parents to 
employ him as a teacher of their children has no right to make 
the chief aim of his work in that position the proselyting of 
these children for some interest not implied in the teaching con- 
tract, and not in accord with the views of the parents. 

There is, fortunately, in most communities, the belief, usually 
abundantly justified, that the teacher will lend his influence to 
no organization that does not fill a necessary place in our social 
and civic organizations, that does not stand for things worthy 
of general recognition. The teacher will exercise in matters of 
a partisan nature, the same charity toward others that he would 
awaken in them toward himself. He must not enlist in any of 
these organizations merely for the prestige to be gained ; if he 
should be so foolish, he would bring upon himself the contempt 
of those within the membership as well as without. The teacher 
should be cautioned that he is in danger of diminishing his 
acceptability as a teacher, if, in the matters discussed earlier 
in this chapter as well as in the points now under discussion, he 
allows himself to assume an air of business haste in attending 
to them. It is possible for the teacher to repel in his excessive 
efforts to be agreeable ; it is probable that he may so hasten the 
doing of unnecessary good things as to make his good become 
evil in its effects. There is a question often raised whether 
men should do evil that good may come ; the teacher should go 



PREPARING FOR A PARTICULAR SCHOOL. 71 

farther with his care, and not do good in such a way that evil 
may come. 

The teacher s investments and financial standing influence 
his success to an extent justifying some discussion in addition 
to what has been said about engaging his school. If only the 
matter of hiring board is to be considered, he should not make 
the same kind of bargain for cheap accommodations that might 
be made by one whose relations with others will have little to 
do with the question of success. The people with whom the 
teacher lives can do much for his help or his hindrance. In the 
uncertain tenure of a teacher's position may be found good 
reason against his owning property that would make a change 
of location inconvenient. However advantageous for all par- 
ties a long term of service may be, it is not always best for 
the teacher to indicate that he expects such a term. The busi- 
ness habits of those who fix teachers 7 salaries often lead them 
to keep the wages of a teacher as low as they can without losing 
him. The teacher's wages will be kept up to the usual stand- 
ards by such boards only when they feel that the interests 
committed to his care cannot be transferred more easily than 
he can transfer. The teacher should be at least as free to profit 
from competition for his services as the schools may be to 
profit from competition for his place. It has been suggested 
that the life of a teacher does not prepare him for success in 
financial matters. He must, however, be prompt and reliable 
in meeting his financial engagements, or he will constitute a 
pernicious example that should not be long continued. He must 
also, in a position where there are no provisions for retiring on 
a pension, find means of providing for himself when he becomes 
helpless, and of assuring for those dependent upon him proper 



72 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

support. He will be solicited continually by those who find 
salaried people easy victims for investments on the installment 
plan. He jeopardizes not only his money, but his efficiency 
as a teacher, if he invests in ventures promising excessive re- 
turns. Whether he gets the expected profits or loses the invest- 
ment, his mind is drawn from attention to his work. He would 
better be content with a safe investment of his salary, better get 
a small income and save the principal, than seek a large income 
and lose the principal. Those who do business on any other 
plan are not likely to be successful teachers. The teacher should 
not risk his all in a single venture. For instance, wise pre- 
caution on the part of a teacher would not allow him to take 
an insurance policy or any other contract which requires long- 
continued payment of a fixed sum at fixed times, as his sole 
dependence for support in his later years, with the penalty 
of losing all that has been paid if a payment defaults. This 
remark does not condemn life insurance, nor condemn all plans 
of such companies except life insurance proper. A plan that 
would give the teacher the opportunity to stop his assessments 
when necessary, and to have as their accumulation a paid-up 
life annuity, would be a good investment for a part of his spare 
salary. The teacher's financial management should not be 
shaped for the purpose of amassing wealth for its own sake, 
nor for the sake of the pleasure and the prestige its posses- 
sion would bring. 



III. ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 



1. First Steps. 

"First impressions are lasting" with most people, and cer- 
tainly no less with children than with older people. The man- 
ner in which school is begun gives the first positive impression 
in which there will be practical agreement among those who 
are to be the teacher's daily companions. Before the pupils 
have settled down to their work, they notice everything the 
teacher does, and the events occurring then with a new teacher 
will be remembered throughout all the period of his service with 
them, no matter what may be forgotten of the things that 
happen later. The teacher should, therefore, be at his very best 
on this first day of school. Not only should his physical condi- 
tion be free from weariness and his mental equipment in the 
most efficient order, but he should be dressed with unusual care, 
and should have as much of his time and strength as possible 
at his disposal for unforeseen and unexpected demands upon 
him. Nothing should be left to do on this first day that could 
be done in advance, even though its doing in advance may cost 
much more time than would be necessary during the busier 
period. Better do before the first day things liable not to be 
needed, than find them needed and not be able to do them. A 
minute on the first day is sometimes as important as an hour 
on some other day. " Well begun is half done," is an old maxim 
that comes as near truth in the school-room as anywhere else in 

human experience. 

(73) 



74 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

Organization is necessary for the parts of a living, working 
whole. We do not organize material into a building. We liter- 
ally organize a school; that is, make organs for the doing of 
work. A great American general emphasized the need of or- 
ganization in an army by saying in the introduction to his 
book on military tactics, "An unorganized army is a mob." 
A gathering of American men and women would not long re- 
main unorganized ; some writer has humorously suggested that 
if only two are in a meeting, they follow the custom of the coun- 
try and divide between them the offices of a formal organization. 
Nevertheless, it is true that if an army is unorganized it be- 
comes a mob, and much more would it be true of a crowd of 
children whose lack of organization would allow a perpetual 
riot with no sense of responsibility. 

Permanent organization, as truly as it can ever be perma- 
nent, should be the goal for the teacher's first steps. There 
should not be any talk of temporary organization, even though 
this organization be thought of as to be considered for perma- 
nent adoption, after the fashion of a political convention. The 
teacher will find occasion to speak of the probability of a later 
change sufficiently to indicate that nothing is fixed beyond the 
possibility of correction or improvement. There will, of course, 
be more frequent occasion for adjustment in the first work than 
later, but the earlier things can be placed to stay, and the 
fewer the arrangements that are made to change, the better. 

The seating of the pupils will begin before the hour for open- 
ing school. The children will come early to school this morn- 
ing to see the teacher, and they should be greeted with the offer 
of a seat as naturally as if calling at a home. The choice of 
seats of proper size for the pupils will probably be made quite 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 75 

as satisfactorily now as at any later time when the reason for 
assignment might need to be given. If the teacher has infor- 
mation as to any who are deficient in hearing or sight, or who 
have other good reason to have special locations, he can accom- 
modate them now without giving the reason. He will, of course, 
if there is question, say kindly that the seat can be changed 
later if there is cause. Even the considerations here suggested 
might be waived at the beginning for the preferences of pupils, 
as for instance the allowing of friends to sit near each other. 
The teacher would do such friends great wrong to part them 
for the mere purpose of preventing disorder. If some part of 
the room must be closely seated, the pupils crowded togethei 
would better be nearest the teacher, provided they are not so 
close to him as to be tempted to hide their mischief under the 
book he may hold in his hand while doing his work. Let all be 
placed as fully to their satisfaction, however, as possible, and 
let them hope to retain these satisfactory positions by their 
good -conduct. 

The taking and learning of names should be a matter of very 
little ado, but it should be completed promptly and thoroughly. 
A, diagram showing the seat occupied by each should be on the 
teacher's desk, and if any of the names are liable to be mispro- 
nounced, they should be marked to guard against mistake. If 
the teacher cannot easily make the entries himself, he can prob- 
ably engage some competent pupil to insert the names in the 
blank so that he may address each by name from the first. 
No matter if the pupils do find that he resorts to such help ; 
this impression will be better than the impression that he does 
not have wit enough or interest enough to master names by 
any method. He will learn to call the names of all more quickly 



76 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

without help if he takes care to speak the name with every ad- 
dressing of the person, even though it costs some trouble for 
some time. The teacher himself must make the inquiries as 
to the age and residence of the pupils who are received in school, 
and must know the law as to who are eligible, as well as any 
special rules which the board may be authorized to make. The 
roll of the names should be made out in alphabetic order as 
soon as possible, for the teacher should begin at once his perma- 
nent records. He will have occasion to find names from their 
first letter, possibly even to consult the alphabetic list to refresh 
his memory when he can think of only the first letter of some 
name he is trying to remember. There is no more advantage in 
calling the roll for the learning of names than there would be 
in calling the names aloud to one's self, as far as the teacher is 
concerned, for he would need to see who is responding. A much 
better method of taking the roll promptly is the reporting of 
vacant seats for each file of desks by the student who sits at 
the rear. If at the time to take the roll these students in 
order report all present, or give the number of the seat from 
the front in which there is an absence, the teacher knows in a 
moment what is to be posted to his record. 

Opening exercises of such patriotic, devotional and religious 
nature as can secure the voluntary and interested attention and 
participation, should begin the day. The teacher will have 
learned before this time what is feasible. The terms of the stat- 
utes and the decisions of the courts in regard to the use of the 
Bible in the schools of the particular state should be well known 
to the teacher. He should not ask the board to make a special 
ruling on the subject. A teacher who repeats the Lord's Prayer 
with his school because the board orders it, probably does no 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 77 

good by repeating it. A teacher who, when forbidden to repeat 
the Lord's Prayer, chants it with his school as a part of the 
singing, is not thereby strengthening a proper religious spirit. 
School songs to which none will object breathe inspiration for 
all. If Scripture-reading and prayer can be used without of- 
fense, so much the better. The reading of alternate verses by 
the school, or the dividing of verses in Psalms and Proverbs 
at the principal pause, the teacher taking the first part and the 
pupils, in concert, the last, makes a good exercise. The frequent 
repetition of an entire passage in concert until it is memorized, 
and its use after it is memorized, will furnish a good substi- 
tute for the reading. The Lord's Prayer may, without impro- 
priety, be used even by a teacher who is not accustomed to lead 
in religious services, for there is surely no one worthy to teach 
who cannot with propriety lead in its petitions. The use of 
extemporaneous prayer is open to the objection that might be 
made against comments on the Scripture, which we are fre- 
quently admonished should not be sectarian in their nature. 
It is greatly to be desired that so far as any particular school 
is concerned, there shall be no rule for or against devotional 
exercises; harm would come from requiring a teacher to lead 
against his will even more than from forbidding a teacher who 
wishes to lead in such exercises. Whatever may be the rule 
or the lack of rule on the subject, the school needs for its 
general exercises thoughts that will build up moral strength, 
and will contribute that element of spiritual culture which con- 
stitutes the best part of an education. 

The assigning of the first lessons is preeminently the occa- 
sion when the teacher needs to do many things at the same 
time. If a part of the pupils wait while he attends to the 



78 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

others, they are likely to do worse than merely to waste their 
time. The teacher will make these assignments most easily by 
being ready to uncover on the board work that he knew in ad- 
vance would be appropriate. In any school with many grades 
under one teacher, he would find most of the students able 
to proceed with the addition of some six or eight numbers of 
about five figures each, and enough of these numbers could be on 
the board to busy all with finding sums and reviewing their 
work when the teacher is not calling their attention to his as- 
signments. Of course his first attention in giving other work 
would be to children, if any, who could not take work from 
the board nor receive assignments from text-books. The teacher 
should take care that no lessons are assigned to be learned from 
text-books not in reach of all the class. When he has called the 
attention of any students to lessons written on the board for 
them, he will receive their papers with the additions as first 
assigned, and so continue until all are given regular work. 

2. Early Arrangements. 

Plans for work will elaborate many points on which some 
change from the usual custom may be found worthy of adop- 
tion, or some more definite understanding may seem necessary. 

The janitor is one individual with whom the teacher should 
be on sympathetic terms. He needs the teacher's cooperation; 
it always takes at least two to cooperate. There should be as 
definite understanding concerning the time he may have pos- 
session of the rooms for sweeping as there is concerning the 
time when he is to have them in order for the day. He must 
not let his sweeping remain until morning, when too little time 
will remain for the dust to settle before his work must be fin- 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 79 

ished. He should use a slightly dampened cloth to make the 
final cleaning of furniture each morning, and he must think to 
wipe off dust and pick up litter wherever he is passing about the 
building. He will need to know when he is to clean the chalk- 
trays. Janitors soon become blind to dirt if they are neglected. 
The janitor should go about during school hours as much as 
may be necessary to keep the rooms comfortable, for, even if a 
student, he can better watch the conditions than can the teacher. 
He will need help to discover that his schoolroom floors would 
be protected by his cleaning muddy walks and crossings near 
the building, and that he will save himself much trouble if, 
when snow comes, he will remove it from the walks before it is 
tramped down. The janitor also needs advice from the teacher 
as to how he may keep on good terms with the students, for he 
does not have the facilities for professional training that 
teachers can secure. Above all else, the teacher should take 
care to speak to and of the janitor in the presence of others in 
a way that will save his self-respect and secure respect for his 
work. 

A system of signals that will save time and really secure 
more promptness and clearer understanding than spoken com- 
munications could, should be introduced as opportunity offers. 
Whether the eye or the ear is to discover the signal, there 
should be the necessity of attention to notice it. The ear 
should be addressed to catch the eye, as the pupil uses the eye 
most of the time for other purposes than discovering signals. 
The bell is recognized as the most appropriate school-signal. 
A motion of the hand by the teacher when the attention of the 
eye has been called, or when the school has reached the time 
for that signal, may be positive when so slight that those not 



80 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



knowing what to look for will not discover it. Hand-signals 
from pupils to secure the teacher's nod of assent to some request 
may facilitate the giving of some of the common permissions, 
but there is no such need of signals to the teacher as there is 
of signals by him to move class or school in unison. Whatever 
signal the teacher gives must be promptly obeyed ; if he goes on 
without obtaining this obedience, his hold is lost. When suc- 
cessive signals call for rising, passing, etc., he should not give 
the second until obedience to the first is fully completed. 

Rules and regulations are for the most part introduced cas- 
ually as guides for conforming to the custom of the community, 
or modifying that custom in some respect. For most matters 
of conduct, the common sense of propriety will make rules 
needless. It is not necessary to announce a rule against swear- 
ing on the premises in order that the teacher may be warranted 
in reproving the first offender. His announcing the rule would 
suggest to some an effort to bend the rule as far as they can 
without breaking it. Rules for procedure should be formulated 
as occasion may require. There will be necessity for absence 
and tardiness and leaving of seats and room and for communi- 
cation during* school hours. The teacher will make his own 
plans as to keeping these annoyances down to the minimum, 
taking care always not to substitute a greater evil for a less. 
He should not drive a pupil to absence to prevent tardiness, 
nor compel one to lose time because he cannot communicate 
nor leave his seat. The teacher will take care in these matters 
of procedure, as well as in the control of the pupils' conduct, 
not to forbid a thing at one time and then allow it at another 
under similar circumstances. If he does, the one who was 
forbidden has ground for suspecting partiality toward the one 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 81 

who was allowed ; or if the same pupil is indulged or permitted 
at one time and is forbidden at another, he will feel that the 
teacher is weak in his yielding or is, at best, responsible for the 
discomfiture of the refusal. 

In connection with absences, may be mentioned the special 
occasions that come more or less frequently to take large num- 
bers of students on the same day. The teacher cannot expect 
people to disregard what the church calendar has made sacred 
to them. Saturday is regarded by many as the Sabbath, and 
no school having pupils who wish to observe that day should 
adopt the plan which some schools take in giving Monday as 
the school holiday to relieve their students of the temptation 
to study on Sunday. 

The usual custom of taking some part of one day in the week 
for general literary exercises may give the. teacher an oppor- 
tunity to introduce without apparent innovation some work 
that will help the pupils and secure the interested attention 
of the parents. As only a part of the school are preparing in 
any one week, they must make their preparation as extra work, 
and the vacation at the end of the week gives the most time for 
such extras. It would therefore seem that Monday is the best 
day for these exercises. In order that visitors may know when 
to come, the same hour would better be used regularly, but 
the program for that day should be changed so as to omit the 
different regular school exercises in turn, and not always take 
the time from the same subjects. 

The classifying of pupils is a daily problem for the teacher. 
At the beginning of school, he must promptly choose the places 
for the new ones. The old classification for those who have 
been there before is probably better than any the new teacher 



82 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



could make, even by giving a general examination. The data 
needed for classification are the pupil's previous attainments, 
his natural ability and disposition, and the circumstances likely 
to influence his future work. At the first interview, the 
teacher guesses at the second and third of these mostly from 
what he can learn of the first. The pupil's disposition toward 
work in his class depends largely on whether he feels that he 
is being advanced. The pupil who is placed with a class too 
advanced is likely to have only a temporary satisfaction, and 
then to yield to discouragement because he cannot master his 
work. As no two pupils have exactly the same attainments, 
strength and surroundings, all are likely to suffer more or 
less of inconvenience for the sake of their classmates. The ad- 
vantages of classification more than compensate for the loss. 

1. The teacher works more economically if dealing with 
classes. Even when there is considerable diversity in the at- 
tainment, the teacher can make one presentation of a subject 
serve all, and relieve him of the necessity of repeating it before 
it is reached by another class. 

2. Pupils receive instruction from the recitation of their 
classmates. "When all are studying the same subject, one strug- 
gling through a difficulty in the recitation, enables others to 
follow him as they could not follow the teacher if he were seek- 
ing to help them without giving them a chance to explain in 
one another's presence. 

3. The pupil will do more and tetter work and do it more 
easily in a class. The racer makes better time if he can have 
a companion to pace him. The inspiration from knowing that 
others are doing the same work will permeate the entire class. 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 83 

Large classes as contrasted with small would be better in tbe 
light of the previous considerations, but there are other reasons 
which limit the size of classes. The teacher's assistance to 
the individual, opportunity to test individual preparation, the 
pupil's chance to get strength from reciting must be restricted 
in a large class. The older pupils of a school get more of 
good and suffer less of harm from large classes. For lower 
grades, not more than ten in a class nor more than twenty to a 
teacher should be the limit. For the upper grades, each of 
these numbers may be doubled. For ungraded schools, it is 
difficult to make the classes large enough to take care of all the 
pupils in the number of recitations that the teacher can suc- 
cessfully conduct; in the graded schools, the number of reci- 
tations can be kept low enough, but the number in a class and 
in a room is likely to be too large. 

ISTot only must the assigning of new pupils begin from the 
first in accordance with the foregoing considerations, but the 
transferring of former pupils to other classes must begin soon, 
because of readiness for advancement that may be discovered, 
or because of necessity for turning back that may have arisen 
from absence or from failure in the work. This reassigning of 
former pupils is a most delicate duty. It will not do to restrict 
the whole class to review work for their benefit. Combination 
of advanced work with review of the work the next lower class 
is doing might show who find call for their best efforts in that 
lowest work. The excusing of the strong members from that 
lowest work would be the next step and the excusing of the 
weak ones from the advanced work would complete their trans- 
fer. A teacher whose long experience in the school has estab- 
lished a reputation for discretion and fairness might not need 



84 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



to be so cautious in setting pupils back, but the new teacher is 
liable to make the mistake of believing that the blame can safely 
be laid on his predecessor's bad work when, as a matter of 
fact, the new teacher is the readiest sacrifice for the altar of 
criticism. Even the casual, individual adjustment made by the 
teacher must be so made as not to render his path more rugged 
and thorny, but to smooth the way as much as possible for 
future progress. 

3. Fobmal Announcements. 

A definitely stated program, either printed for general dis- 
tribution or written where it can be seen before the first day 
of school opens, is the most important single item in organiz- 
ing the school. It enables the pupils to begin at once to adjust 
themselves to the work before them. If the program has been 
known before the first day of school, they are more likely to 
have books and other material ready for use in their classes. 
Knowing the program prompts them to prepare their lessons 
well, not only the first day, but all succeeding days, because 
they know exactly the hour at which the work is due. The 
steady and sure progress of the hands on the clock-dial, the re- 
lentless striking of the bells indicating the approach of the 
period for the recitation, will be most effective and constant as 
calls to duty. The teacher himself needs the pledge of his 
announced program to hold him to the distribution of his time 
as his best judgment has decided it should be distributed. 
Not only must he be prompt in following the program for the 
sake of fixing in the students the habit of being ready for each 
exercise, but he must shape his work in each item of the pro- 
gram so as to complete it in the time allotted, and thus accom- 
plish his full day's work. A program conscientiously observed 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 85 

is the only safeguard against the slighting of the last exercises 
of the session by both teacher and pupil. No school can reach 
the highest success without a definite program. 

The program last used in the school should be secured for 
guidance in making the new program. That program cannot 
have been so faulty, nor can the recent changes in the school 
or the course have been so great, as to justify the ignoring of 
the plans previously followed. However great the changes to be 
made by the new teacher, he should study the old program to 
see how these changes can be made with the least friction and 
the least confusion. All possible sources of information should 
be drawn upon as to the probable demand for classes in the 
various subjects or grades during the current term. The 
course of study to be followed will place before the teacher 
the work for which he is to provide, and he .must decide what 
of its subjects and classes shall be taken up at once. It may be 
that some classes called for in the course should not be organ- 
ized so frequently even as once a year. If, for instance, the 
advanced classes in high-school subjects are very small, the 
highest two classes could take one subject together one year, 
with the understanding that it will be omitted the next, and 
taken again by the highest two classes the following year. In 
the elementary school, where all grades are taught by one 
teacher, the making of this kind of combination might accom- 
modate two or even more classes in the same subjects in all the 
years from the beginning of the fifth upward. This plan will 
carry a pupil forward now in one subject, then in another, in 
such a way as to make his development somewhat unsymmetri- 
cal, but there is room to doubt whether courses of study pro- 
vide so accurately for symmetry as to justify attention to that 
objection. The question as to whether the pupil is taking the 



86 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

parts of the same subject in such sequence as prepares him for 
what he is asked to do, is of vital importance, and there must 
be no such combination of classes as will put the least ad- 
vanced into work beyond their strength. The teacher needs, 
therefore, not only to know the program as followed for some 
time preceding, but to plan for some of its items, as may be 
necessary, very far in the future. 

As to the number of hours per day to be occupied by the school 
program, it may be found that the statute makes a requirement. 
If so, does the unwritten law of custom count all intermissions 
as a part of the required service? It would seem reasonable 
that the short recesses in which the pupils are under the teach- 
er's care as thoroughly as during recitations, should be consid- 
ered as a part of the required time. Whether all the pupils 
should be kept in school during all the hours required of the 
teacher is another question. The highest success of the smaller 
children will not be attained by keeping them in the school- 
room at the usual school employments so many hours per day 
as the larger pupils are kept. Three hours should contain all 
the work the little people are to do at school in a day, and if 
these three hours can be divided between the forenoon and the 
afternoon, so much the better. If the small children are not 
able to go to and from school without the company of their 
brothers and sisters, the program should provide for their 
recreation either indoors or out during a part of the working 
time of the advanced classes. If many of the pupils live too 
far from the school building to go home at the noon intermis- 
sion, it may be feasible to make a short recess at that time for 
lunch, and then dismiss for the day earlier. In that case, school 
might begin early enough in the morning to finish about two- 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 87 

thirds of the usual day before noon, and thus leave a larger 
portion of the day for consecutive outside employment. This 
plan is more generally acceptable for older pupils; children 
should not be hurried in the morning to the extent of shortening 
their sleep or bringing them to school without breakfast. The 
giving of plenty of time for sleep and for the. taking of regular 
meals with the family should be the chief aim in this adjust- 
ment of school hours. 

The arrangement of the program will be affected by the pur- 
poses of the teacher in regard to study outside of school hours. 
It is as important that the children should be kept from too 
many hours of study as that they should be led to use enough 
time for their most satisfactory advancement. While no two 
children require or can endure exactly the same amount of 
study and recitation per day, it is believed that, on an average, 
eight hours per day for boys and six for girls, should be the 
limit. Healthy children of age for the fourth year of school 
work and above, should all have enough work provided to keep 
them busy for from five to six hours a day, and should be re- 
quired to do that work. No shortening or change of school 
hours in the making of the program should release pupils who 
need the help of the teacher's supervision to secure this mini- 
mum of effective work. Classes that are expected to study at 
home will be more likely to do so if the subject for home studv 
recites at the beginning of the day when there can be no hope 
of making the necessary preparation after coming to school. 
Classes with papers to prepare in their study, or with problems 
to solve, are more likely to find definite work for home study. 
The teacher, if planning a program to call for study outside of 
school hours, should plan it to necessitate as little carrying of 



88 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



books back and forth as possible. The program should be shaped 
to place no excessive burdens on the pupils. 

As to the order in which the subjects come on the program, 
there are other conditions more important than what has just 
been suggested. The different degrees of fatigue produced by 
different studies, and the varying effect that fatigue exerts 
upon the efficiency in the different studies, should be carefully 
considered. Experiments seem to show that memory suffers 
least through the day if the studies are taken according to 
their nature in such order as would be indicated by the follow- 
ing list of topical subjects: mathematics, science, language, 
reading, geography, history. Since accuracy and the power of 
attention diminish as the fatigue increases, this order is per- 
haps as good as could be suggested with regard to those con- 
siderations. Arithmetic, for instance, demands the greatest 
accuracy and attention, and therefore takes the earliest place 
for all these reasons. Any study that the teacher finds unusu- 
ally difficult to teach would better, other things being equal, 
come early in the day. He will be likely to prepare himself 
better for each day's recitation, and, too, with no better prepa- 
ration by the teacher than in the afternoon, the class will be 
able to succeed in the forenoon when the afternoon recitation 
in the teacher's weak subject would be a failure. It is sug- 
gested here incidentally, that a pupil might find in a difficult 
subject the difference between the beginning and the close of 
the day to be the difference between success and failure, and that 
when he can have a choice, he make it in the light of these sug- 
gestions. TJae teacher will take care to distribute the recita- 
tions of each class through the day at as nearly equal intervals 
as possible, and will probably need some adjustment with ref- 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 89 

erence to facility in changing from one recitation to another ; as, 
for instance, if time is short for the arithmetic recitation, there 
should be an opportunity during the previous recitation for 
the placing of solutions on the board by the members of the 
arithmetic class. The closing recitation of the day should, as 
nearly as possible, busy all the pupils of the room. Any who 
may be kept waiting for dismissal with nothing to do are likely 
to find something that they should not do. 

The length of time given to a recitation in the program is 
not necessarily proportioned to the importance of the subject, 
but is rather determined by the requirement for success. In a 
diversity of classes as to age, the time of recitation should 
usually be longer for older pupils. Beginners cannot hold 
their attention to a subject very long at a time. The children 
in the lower grades should recite more frequently than those 
more advanced, and should have also more attention and assist- 
ance in the preparation of their lessons. The program for little 
children needs to show what should be their study or other work 
at their seats while other classes are reciting. It is often found 
worth while to direct the little children to make in concert any 
change from one employment to another as called for by the 
program. Even the more advanced classes may well have one 
day in the week in which the ordinary program period for reci- 
tation becomes a study period in which the teacher helps the 
weaker pupils toward right methods of study. Members of the 
class who do not need this help could be encouraged to use the 
time in some extra work not offered to the weaker students. In 
fact, the program might announce a time near the close of the 
day when pupils who have regular work in safe shape for th« 
next recitation could have the privilege of certain books in the 



90 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

library, or some other employment that all might be led to 
desire. The pupils should get the power of choosing wisely for 
themselves, casual employments. 

What has been said as to casual work should not lead the 
teacher into the habit of mixing all sorts of discussions and em- 
ployments through all the school hours. Such casual calling 
of attention from study and recitation would produce casual- 
ties of too serious a nature. Many of the personal interviews 
contemplated here will happen outside of school hours, and many 
whose necessity appears during school hours should be made 
occasions for special appointments. The teacher must not frit- 
ter his teaching-time away with diversions that do not assist 
the regular work of his classes. There should be a proper time 
in school for miscellaneous business, and the teacher should 
make a careful choice of what should be introduced as such. It 
may be proper that the school should be used in some measure 
to promote the outside interests of the entire community in 
causes not strictly connected with the teacher's usual work of 
instruction, but reasonable lines must be drawn in order that 
the individuality of the school may be maintained. The school 
is not a general advertising agency, and the prestige of the 
teacher's position should not give endorsement lightly. News- 
papers are available for advertising purposes in most communi- 
ties ; where they are not, the conversation of the children will 
give publicity to local announcements. The school hours should 
be occupied by no exercises that would lower the dignity of 
the school. 

The making of a program for departmental instruction or 
for any other plan of organization that distributes among sev- 
eral teachers the recitations of a class prevents some of the adjust- 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 91 

ments that have been suggested, and demands others because of 
the changed recitations. The recitation for all classes and in 
all subjects will probably not be of the same length. The pupil 
must not be due in two recitations at the same time. The as- 
signments to rooms will need to be adjusted to the seating 
capacity and other conditions. High-school assistants would 
better have their work in the smaller recitation-rooms for the 
sake of easier success in discipline. If such assistants are 
limited by^lack of scholarship, they are likely to teach the less 
advanced classes, which are usually the larger, and those nec- 
essarily recite in the general assembly-room. The program 
should be made to give the same teacher continuous charge of 
the assembly-room, for the sake of avoiding confusion in disci- 
pline. The conditions affecting the program differ so greatly 
in different schools that it is not deemed best to present here 
any sample program, but rather to suggest that the students 
experiment by making a program for an ungraded school of- 
fering eight years of work, another for an intermediate grade 
covering the fourth and fifth years' work in two classes under 
the same teacher, giving program for study as well as recita- 
tion, and another for the eighth, ninth and tenth years of work 
by a principal and assistant, as an average high-school course. 

The course of study necessarily comes up for consideration 
in connection with the program. The new teacher will find him- 
self dissatisfied with the course in use. He must not think he 
could make it perfect. His predecessor, if a modest and pro- 
gressive teacher, was undoubtedly conscious during all his 
service that the course needed further improvement. Scarcely 
anything more rash could be done by a new teacher than to 



92 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

begin his work with the publication of a new or greatly changed 
course of study. The most he should risk is the confidential 
discussion of the course with members of the board, and per- 
haps a few others on whose advice he can rely. Whatever 
changes are practically assured should be anticipated as far as 
may be feasible in the program; as, for instance, the intro- 
duction of an optional study which is likely to be required 
later, or an apparently temporary omission of a study whose 
permanent exclusion is contemplated. The urgent problem is 
the adapting of the course so that all the subjects required 
shall be provided for. The requirements of the statutes are 
not always easy to meet. Perhaps some one subject — as, for 
example, physiology — must be taught in all the grades. What 
is the full list of subjects that the school is compelled by law 
to furnish if demanded? What are the subjects in which the 
teacher must give instruction if required by the board ? Does 
the range of the examination for the teachers' certificate indi- 
cate the scope of the required work in school? Are there 
subjects which cannot legally be taught at the expense of the 
public-school fund, even though board, teacher and patrons 
should wish to introduce them into the schools? What may 
be required of a pupil by teacher and board as to the taking 
of the course regularly ? Can a pupil be legally excluded from 
advanced classes or from the school if he refuses to take the 
lower subjects in the course? No legislation can make a com- 
munity to fit a given course of study. The community grows 
under skillful guidance to be ready for what has been the aim 
of that guidance. The course of study must be shaped with a 
definite aim. The mere teaching of what has come down from 
tradition will not produce progress. The higher schools have 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 93 

always set the standard for the lower, and will always do so. 
The lower schools should adapt their courses to fit for some 
higher, in order that they may not be the means of turning their 
students aside from the path of culture. This does not mean 
that their work shall be so incomplete or unpractical as to be 
of no value to one who must find in them the last of his school 
opportunities, nor that every school must furnish a variety of 
courses to accommodate these differing conditions. The course 
of study must be shaped with regard not only to these consid- 
erations, but to the limitations which will be found in the num- 
ber of pupils desiring particular lines of work, in the capacity 
of the school building and equipment, and in the financial 
strength or weakness of the community, measured, as such 
strength or weakness must be in the legal control of the school, 
by sentiment in regard to making expenditures for educational 
purposes. 

4. Details of Organization. 

Co-education has been discussed along lines that offer some 
suggestions as to plans of organization. Considerations as to 
sex should affect the relations of teachers as well as of pupils. 
If the school has more than one teacher, it is desirable that 
both sexes be represented in the teaching force. The training of 
children demands both the masculine and the feminine influence. 
The child deprived of either father or mother suffers an inesti- 
mable loss. The pupil, whether boy or girl, whose entire school- 
time is under teachers of the same sex must lack certain ele- 
ments of the fullest education. The man who teaches cannot 
compensate for the loss of womanly influence by being womanish 
in disposition; there is nothing but harm in any mannish 



94 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

traits of the woman who teaches. Small children of both sexes 
would better be taught by a woman ; children about to enter on 
their teens are at an age when they would be likely to do 
better if all were assigned to teachers of their own sex; when 
somewhat older, yet before the years of manhood and woman- 
hood are reached, every one should have the experience of being 
guided by trustworthy, sympathetic and dignified teachers of 
both sexes. There may be here and there a teacher who, having 
sole charge of a child through all its education, would get 
better results than would follow the alternating of masculine 
and feminine influence, but we can hardly expect to find many 
such. 

The mingling of pupils of both sexes in the same schoolroom 
has some advantages and some disadvantages, and the teacher 
should plan so that the former may be utilized and the latter 
avoided, as far as possible. Our first public schools were co- 
educational as a matter of economy, but they did not keep the 
sexes together for any such length of time as do the public 
schools of to-day. We have now extended our curriculum until 
young people in their teens are taking more elaborate instruction 
than was formerly given in the colleges. This extended work 
has continued coeducation into the years of youth, into the 
period of life in which there is ground for the greatest objection 
to teaching the two sexes in the same classes. While there is 
no sufficient cause for avoiding coeducation in the period before 
sex asserts itself, or in the proper time for the college course, 
when maturity has been reached, yet in the grammar and high- 
school grades there is a more serious condition. For girls, the 
period of adolescence is the time when permanent ill-health is 
most likely to begin if there is continuous hard work and nervous 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 95 

excitement. It is not to be supposed that the public schools are 
responsible for all the evils of the time, but the fact that the 
public school is expanding its field more than is any other in- 
fluence, may well create the suspicion that school conditions 
have something to do with almost any change that is taking 
place. American women are thought to have lost physical 
strength in the past century. Women living in civilizations 
less complex are in better physical condition. Even barbarous 
and savage people give to their women absolute rest at the period 
of danger. Our schools are organized so that such rest is next 
to impossible. 

The abandoning of the close classification that commonly 
holds in the grammar school would give relief to the girl. She 
comes to the period of the greatest drain on her vital forces at 
a time when she is probably taking music lessons, and should 
be helping about some housework, is anxious also to do all kinds 
of knick-knacks in fancy work ; and yet with all these she must 
keep up with her studies at the same rate as the boy, who has 
nothing else to do but exercise, eat and sleep. She has before 
her all the while the terrible threat of a failure in arithmetic 
or some other one subject that will not let her pass with .her 
grade. Better encourage her to drop the subject of her worry, 
even though to satisfy her you allow her to take up some subject 
in advance of her grade, and leave the other never to be taken. 
You can soon have her classification so broken up that she will 
not feel the spirit of competition that would drive her to excess. 

Teachers who have come through the country schools need not 
be told how to manage the city grammar school when it comes 
to a breaking-up of the classes. Of course there will not longer 
be that symmetrical alternation of two sections whose entire 



96 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

membership come together from study to recitation. Why may 
there not properly be a great difference in the number of 
studies taken by the pupils of the same grade ? Certainly there 
must be subjects enough given to the strong to use their time 
profitably, but there should be few enough given to the weak 
to let them escape the sense of burden. There is already a 
chance for relief in the offering of electives in high schools, and 
the conditions of coeducation demand that the opportunity for 
choice of studies shall be brought down to the grammar schools. 
Where this can be done, the two sexes may well drift apart in 
their specialization. Only a few are fitting for college, and 
therefore necessarily hold together in their preparation. If girls 
choose each study for its own sake, and take only what time they 
may properly allow, they will not keep in close classification. 

The tendencies of the playground are often toward rude 
scuffling such as violates the proprieties for persons on the verge 
of manhood and womanhood. In the hours for study and recita- 
tion, the grammar-school and high-school age is a time when the 
proximity of a student to another of the opposite sex is most 
likely to be destructive of attention to business, and a time when 
a boy should not be seated so near a girl as to tempt him to im- 
proprieties. We may seat children or mature students pro- 
miscuously as to sex, but there should be care in this matter 
with students in their teens. The pretty talk we have heard 
about the advantages of educating a sister along with her 
brother is mostly nonsense or worse than nonsense when it 
means educating at this period a boy with somebody else's sister 
or a girl with somebody else's brother. There is a self-con- 
sciousness of both sexes in the presence of each other at the 
high-school age which produces a very different effect from the 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 97 

refining, balancing influences the brothers and sisters exert upon 
one another in the home. In the ordinary business of mixed 
classes in school, the girl of delicate sensitiveness will suffer 
untold misery rather than absent herself or excuse^ herself from 
her work and take the chance of an investigation liable to be as 
embarrassing as a trial in a police court. If the girls could, 
from a sympathetic lady teacher, or even from a married man 
whom they have come to consider much as they would a father, 
receive the information that their absences every three or four 
weeks for reasons peculiar to their sex would occasion no public 
remark, such concession would go far toward removing a serious 
difficulty. It is, of course, to be understood that talking to the 
girls indiscreetly about this subject is liable to make them think 
too much about it for their own good, but this danger will not 
justify complete silence. It should be remembered that per- 
sonal conferences to which the girls could come unobserved 
would be almost a necessity for the teacher who is to care for 
their well-being in a mixed school. 

Teachers will find in every school, no matter what the age 
of the pupils, some for whose management special care must be 
taken because of circumstances pertaining to sex. 

Automatic work is the kind most easily performed, and the 
teacher should effect a school organization that becomes to some 
degree automatic. Every pupil should know so well what he 
should be doing at any given time as to do it without dallying 
and without confusion, even though the teacher were temporarily 
absent. The teacher sometimes has reason to believe that in 
such cases the school does better than if he were present. His 
absence is, however, merely a proving of the machinery to see 
how it will work. This work is merely a trial trip, and is not 



98 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

really doing business. If the teacher does not do his school 
more good by being with it than by being absent, he would better 
stay away all the time and let the school board save his salary. 
Such of the routine as possible should be planned to move for- 
ward in the teacher's presence without his giving special direc- 
tions. If a signal is struck at the close of the recitation, the class 
might understand they are to rise at once without a further 
invitation by the teacher. In such ways the teacher is relieved 
of the necessity of giving attention to unnecessary details. He 
must not, however, neglect to see that the self-regulating plans 
work out. 

Self -reporting by pupils is sometimes depended upon to keep 
before the school proper standards of order. The standards will 
lower very rapidly if too much dependence is placed upon these 
reports. Pupils must be trusted if they are to strive to be worthy 
of confidence, but such a thing as the calling of a roll at the 
close of the day to let each report whether or not he has whis- 
pered, will do more harm than good. Such a report is liable to 
become a mere perfunctory response without any general at- 
tempt at accuracy. There must always be self-reporting in all 
kinds of business, and the school may well teach that he who 
does not report correctly will get into trouble. This will not 
be accomplished by a self-reporting that gives its rewards to 
the bad who report falsely, and withholds them from the good 
who are over-conscientious. The automatic processes of the 
school need to be organized so they can proceed without atten- 
tion, and then the teacher needs to be careful that they shall not 
be allowed to proceed without attention. 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 99 



School self-government in its fullest sense means more than 
any self -regulating system, such as might be the mere automatic 
operation of a school under the thorough organization that a 
teacher may have established. It means more than the indi- 
vidual pupil's control of himself in his impulses and tenden- 
cies, important as that may be. The term is used for a system 
of administration in which the entire student body is formally 
entrusted with power, legislative, judicial and executive, that 
is legally vested in the teacher, and that may be delegated to 
the school if the teacher sees fit. 

Two purposes, quite distinct in their nature, should be con- 
sidered in a question of school government: one, the governing 
of the school so as to make the best results feasible in what is 
usually considered the regular work of the school; the other, 
the governing of the school by methods which shall give, in the 
very experiences of school government, a training valuable in 
itself for the career on which the pupil is to enter. If the high- 
est success in both of these two purposes can be obtained by the 
same method of school government, we shall all agree in seek- 
ing that method; if success in accomplishing one purpose pre- 
vents or hinders the realizing of the other purpose, then our 
choice of a method becomes much more difficult. 

In the practice of most teachers, school government has been 
shaped for the obtaining of the best results in the academic 
subjects, and without much regard for other considerations. 
Our ideas of school government have grown from the traditional 
form of family government, the old system of apprenticeship, 
and the methods which the church introduced into its early 
schools* The church, which in the middle ages possessed the 
power of inflicting imprisonment and even capital punishment, 



100 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

is now far less arbitrary than ever before, and allows in most of 
its branches the participation of all members, to some extent at 
least, in its government. In the state there has been a constant 
progress toward universal suffrage, and in our own government 
we have broken down even the barriers of race and sex. The 
state, on assuming the charge of education, limited school life 
to the years of minority, and placed the teacher legally in loco 
parentis, thus keeping the pupils in the position of apprentices. 
A very natural question under these circumstances is why the 
school has not made at least some advance toward embodying 
in its government the wishes of its citizens. Let us not jump 
at the conclusion that the schools are to be condemned in an- 
swering this argument. In the first place, we decline to concede 
that the distribution of power to all classes in church and state 
is without serious dangers and evils. If, however, we cherish 
the faith that the best and wisest will naturally get a leader- 
ship in a democratic or republican form of government, we may 
nevertheless doubt whether the best and wisest of children are 
good enough and wise enough to govern a school. The mature 
minds of the community constitute the proper representatives 
of the children, and these mature minds place their agent over 
the school in the person of the teacher. In this way, the school 
is guided to the attainment of the highest ideals in the com- 
munity in which it exists. Pupils below the age of adolescence 
do not have enough of the altruistic motive to fit them for the 
administration of government. The teacher can govern with 
greater fairness to the governed and with greater efficiency, and 
we are now ready to express concerning the first of the two 
purposes of government, as named in the beginning of this 
subject, the conclusion that, for the securing of the best results 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 101 

in the academic work of the school, government by the pupils is 
not likely to be so effective as government by the teacher. 

The other suggested purpose of school self-government is the 
reason which most of its champions urge for its adoption. The 
definition of education as the preparation for the civilization 
in which one is to live raises the question whether our schools 
fit for citizenship. The tendency of the time is toward increas- 
ing the responsibility of the school, toward laying on it the 
burden of all kinds of training. We are no longer allowed to 
content ourselves with the ideal of the maxim, " Not for school, 
but for life " ; we are reminded that school is life, and are urged 
to bring into our schools the actual processes of society and the 
state. The traditional form of government in the schools, being 
despotism, has no place in American life, and therefore does 
not fit for the civilization for which the pupijs should be pre- 
pared. The future voter receives distorted impressions of the 
motives and the duties of citizenship if he takes his ideas from 
such school government^ or takes them from the newspapers, or 
even from seeing the workings of party caucuses or conventions, 
in which the trickery of selfishness and the triumph of fraud 
too frequently cover the real merits of the issues at stake. 
The hoodlum from the street is more at home in the funda- 
mental operations of our political parties than are the best 
graduates of our schools. There is reason for grave concern in 
America because our young people come suddenly into the duty 
of joining in the administration of government when they have 
had no previous experience in the process. The teacher in a 
self-governed school should shape the ideals and modify their 
application. He reserves certain functions to himself, and 
demands only the same recognition of his rights that he is 



102 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



expected to give to the rights that are conceded to the school. 
The organization of pupils can never assume all the duties of 
government, legislative, judicial and executive, but its members 
can in a practical way receive a gradually increasing compre- 
hension of these three classes of duties, so that when they become 
citizens of the state, they may have a taste and a fitness for the 
highest duties and responsibilities of citizenship. This prepara- 
tion of the whole people is preeminently necessary in a govern- 
ment like ours, and only in the schools can the conditions be 
found for successful training in this line. As the school is 
to fit for the conditions into which the youth of the country 
should enter, our schools should regard preparation for en- 
gaging in "practical politics" of the best kind as one of the 
special aims of their work. 

Since we have found in the above statement of conditions a 
conflict in the two purposes which school self-government should 
serve, it remains for us to discover, if possible, how the ad- 
vantages of training in the processes of government may be 
obtained in the schools, without that detriment to the ordinary 
academic subjects which would result if all other interests 
should be subordinated to the complete carrying-out of an ideal 
plan of self-government. In the first place, it is worth 
while to consider how much of self-governing organization the 
young people of this country already have in connection with 
schools that do not concede student government. The school 
debating-club and the whole range of societies, including the 
Greek-letter fraternities, the class and athletic organizations 
and other student enterprises give a training which fits for 
citizenship. The drafting of constitutions, the electing of 
officers, the management of society finances, the disciplining 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 103 

of delinquents, and the attempt to secure the best members and 
to organize for victory in all sorts of contests, contribute to the 
same purpose. The number of self-governing enterprises in the 
school may be increased by such organizations as societies for 
the care and improvement of the school grounds, for the dec- 
oration of the schoolhouse, etc. A school savings association, 
a school anti-cigarette society, or an organization of the entire 
school to carry on a crusade against any evil that is serious 
enough for a general attack, would extend the training in gov- 
ernment. The teacher must keep in touch with all these organ- 
izations, preferably by finding what members of them need 
suggestions in order that the highest ideals may be realized. 
Of course he must not dominate the deliberations of such or- 
ganizations in such a way as to prevent the freedom of student 
control or to take upon himself responsibility Jor results. Self- 
government as a training needs above all else the experience of 
suffering from self-made mistakes. 

In view of the conditions thus far presented, the question 
arises, whether we can safely, in self-government by a school, 
go to such lengths in the management of organization, or even 
of daily administration, as shall give proper training for cit- 
izenship. A pretense of allowing self-government, if it is not 
really allowed, is a fraud which must give the worst kind of 
training. Better have a limited monarchy which calls itself 
a monarchy than to have an oligarchy or an autocrat to rule 
through dupes who are hoodwinked or wheedled into subserv- 
iency by a pretended giving of responsibility and an insincere 
flattery, with perhaps a clandestine helping to preferment or to 
other rewards. 



104 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

The child begins life with a small capacity for self-govern- 
ment. Our race has, in its development, gone so far beyond 
mere reliance on instinct that its young do not have even the 
native wit to avoid their natural enemies; the parents must 
assume positive control of the children to keep them from eat- 
ing poison or other things they ought not eat, or on the other 
hand, to keep them from being left without anything to eat. 
The child must of course get, in some way, the experience of 
being scorched a little if he is to learn most thoroughly the 
necessity of being careful around the fire, but he must be 
guarded discreetly if he is to come through that experience 
without being scarred for life. As the family could not risk 
anything worthy of the name of organized self-government 
managed by the children, so in the lower grades at least, the 
school could not be turned over to its own government entirely 
without a harm to its vital interests for which no experience in 
self-government can compensate. The belief that every human 
being should for his highest development grow into full self- 
government for the sake of giving the greatest sum total of 
strength in a nation must make every thoughtful patriot a 
believer in self-government for the state, but this view is not 
inconsistent with the belief that every child must make great 
growth under careful guidance before he is ready to participate 
in an organization entirely self-governing. It is not incon- 
sistent with the highest ideals of freedom in a state for us to 
maintain a form of monarchy in the schools, ranging of course 
in its application away from the absolute as fast as growth can 
permit, but nevertheless remaining something of a monarchy 
until the development given by the school has prepared the 
pupils for the highest realization of self-government. 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 105 

The school should no more use all its energies to make special- 
ists in government than to make specialists in housekeeping or 
any trade or profession. The conclusion submitted from the 
above considerations is, that the method of training for partici- 
pation in government should include only as much school self- 
government as is consistent with the best-known processes of 
the " laboratory method/' since the benefits from complete self- 
government by the schools are not sufficient to compensate for 
what they would cost in the sacrifice of the school's efficiency 
in academic instruction. 

5. Records and Reports. 

Legal requirements that apply to this subject must be under- 
stood by the teacher at the very beginning of his school. What 
are the facts and subjects of which daily record must be made ? 
What records must be filed, and what averages, totals, etc., 
must be recorded? What reports are required, and when and 
to whom must they be made? What report or reports must 
be made to secure payment of salary? If the attendance at 
school is the basis for the distribution of school funds, is a part 
of a day to be regarded as a day ? In reporting attendance as a 
guide for distributing funds, are there any pupils who should 
not be included ? What, for instance, if some are being allowed 
to attend who are not of legal school age? What if married 
students attend who are of legal school age? What about 
students from outside the district? By systematically col- 
lecting and arranging from the first the required items, the 
teacher will have a record from which he can easily make his 
reports. 

Teacher, school board and parents have such dependence 
on school facts that the need of records and reports for the 



106 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



school will be readily understood. These will furnish the 
evidence that the teacher has met the time requirement of his 
contract. The school under public control is as truly a formal 
legal proceeding as is the session of a court. Even the simplest 
act of the justice of the peace must have a docket entry ; there 
should be no day's work of a teacher that does not have some 
formal record. 

The teacher needs to know the names and addresses of the 
parents or of some one at least who stands as the guardian or 
the "next best friend " of the pupil. The knowledge of the 
father's occupation may assist the teacher in his proper work 
with the child. While in some schools these may be so well 
known and so easily remembered as to demand no record for 
present guidance, it is worth while to 2et them down for pos- 
sible future reference. Tacts about pupils should be on record, 
to show that they are entitled to the benefits of this particular 
school. The facts about each pupil's daily work should be set 
down for the teacher's guidance, and for the future considera- 
tion of, perhaps, the pupil himself. These facts will be the 
basis of future decisions and actions, and should be on record 
so they may not be in doubt. Some facts about each pupil should 
be matters of regular and formal report to the parents. To 
report simply the delinquencies of the pupil, or to report about 
none except delinquent pupils, would make a sorry showing for 
the school, and perhaps have bad effects in other respects. The 
parent must, nevertheless, have the means of knowing about the 
delinquencies, as well as the pleasure of knowing about the 
successes, of his child. These reports should cover the daily 
work, because the giving of reports concerning success on some 
special occasions only, as on examinations, will cause spasmodic 



ORGANIZING THE SCHOOL. 107 

effort. Reports after the record is completed come to the pupil 
and parent too late for the amendment that might have been 
secured by giving out early information showing the progress 
of the work. 

Alphabetic arrangement in the making of records is a mat- 
ter whose importance is not always appreciated. Of course 
there are groupings of names to be made on other considerations. 
For instance, there may be records that most conveniently deal 
with the names in the order in which the pupils sit in the room. 
There are records in which only a part of the school appear in 
any one list. The teacher should form the habit of placing 
names in alphabetic order if there is no other guide in the ar- 
rangement, even though there should be not more than two in 
the list. Whenever the surname is placed first in the list, it is 
evidence that the alphabetic order is intended. The plan of 
arranging in a list all on the same page who have not only the 
same initial, but also the same vowel next after the initial, an- 
swers for a page where names added from time to time cannot 
be inserted with reference to exact alphabetic order; but lists 
should, whenever possible, be as accurate in their arrangement 
as are the words of the dictionary. In even so simple a matter 
as this, there will be a diversity of arrangement in such words 
as Mabie, McAdoo, MacDonald, Mace, MacFadden. The sug- 
gestion of the above arrangement is, that if the full spelling is 
generally known, the abbreviation is regarded as belonging 
where the full spelling would place it. 

The greatest possibility of successful alphabetic arrangement 
lies in the use of cards, one for each name. Additional names 
can be put in place at any time, and names can be dropped if 
desired, without marring the record. Such cards can be rodded 



108 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

in a drawer as neatly and almost as securely as pages are bound 
in a book. Cards of the size used for library catalogues can be 
obtained cheaply and promptly, and will be found useful for 
more or fewer purposes in every school. Besides affording room 
in 3 x 5 inches for the entry of many facts with each name, they 
will serve as cross-references to records where the names are 
written and numbered in the order of their entries ; as, for in- 
stance, the stubs of receipt books. Records kept in this way 
grow in value as the years pass by, and especially as they come 
into the hands of strangers. The person who prepares records 
should make them not merely so he will know how to find their 
entries with his recollection of how he made them, but so any one 
can readily find them whenever information is desired* The 
work on the records and reports should all be carefully and 
neatly done. The pupils and their parents will be influenced 
by what they see of this work. A good system of records and 
reports carefully kept up will be a great aid to success. 



IV. MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 



There is no well-defined boundary between the teacher's 
measures in organizing his school and his work in shaping the 
ordinary events of the day. He begins to do business while 
still getting ready for business. The measures necessary for 
organization gradually demand less attention as the days go 
by, but there are many tasks and responsibilities of school 
management that come to the teacher with more or less regularity 
through the whole term of school. 

1. The Health and Safety of the Pupjls. 

Contagious and infectious diseases are matters of great con- 
cern. Will the law allow the excluding of children from school 
because they have been exposed? What are the legal provi- 
sions concerning quarantine ? What may be done about requir- 
ing that pupils shall be vaccinated ? What are the diseases that 
may be carried in the clothing or otherwise by persons not affected 
with them ? What is the stage of the various diseases in which 
they are contagious and what the stage in which they are most 
contagious ? The teacher should see to it that at the end of the 
week occasionally there is fumigation of the school building 
thorough enough to kill all the disease germs. Such fumigation 
should be attended to any night if there is reason to believe 
that germs of any contagious disease may have been left in the 
room by some one during the day. It must be remembered that 

(109) 



HO SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

children crowded into a close room, and weary or languid, will 
be more liable to contagion at school than anywhere else. It 
does not follow from this fact that the schools would better 
close during a period in which contagious disease prevails in the 
neighborhood. The children are liable to expose themselves 
more if allowed to roam at large during the day. If those 
exposed are rigorously excluded from the school, the others 
may be safer in school. The question that must have been settled 
even before this point is reached is the legal status of the board 
or boards of health. The teacher must not assume duties or 
responsibilities in these matters that can be placed on the health 
officers or the school board. He should give them prompt infor- 
mation for their guidance, and should take care to get prompt 
information from the proper authority whenever a contagious 
disease is discovered in the homes from which the school is 
liable to infection. The teacher should let pupils be assured 
of the least possible inconvenience to them from their being out 
of school for the safety of others, and both they and their parents 
should be assured of the teacher's appreciation of their self- 
denial in taking care not to cause unnecessary alarm among 
those who remain in school. 

If the building should take fire, the teacher should know just 
what is to be done. Whatever can be done to extinguish the fire 
or to call the fire department or other help without attracting the 
attention of the pupils, should be the first care. They should not 
be expected to sit quietly if they know the building is on fire. 
Their being called to pass out in their usual order at an unusual 
time should be a matter of such frequent occurrence as not to 
awaken the suspicion of a fire. Even if some of them may have 
discovered the fire first and given the alarm, the teacher should 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. m 

dismiss them in line as usual. They need not fall into line 
with each in prescribed position with reference to the others, for 
they will not always start from the same places in the building, 
but they should each take a place in the line and keep it with 
proper intervals. They will follow automatically the order of 
passing to which they are accustomed. Any breaking of this 
order allowed by the teacher would create a panic. The usual 
manner of dismissing school should send the pupils from the 
building as quickly as any fire would necessitate. The pupils 
should be accustomed to direction by signal as to whether they 
are to pass out in a walk or at a run, and as to whether they are 
to go without their wraps, or to take wraps or wraps and books. 
These signals should be practiced sufficiently at intermissions 
and dismissals. This is the only kind of fire drill that would 
be of any value. A drill in the use of fire-extinguishing ap- 
paratus should often be given if it has been deemed worth while 
to have such apparatus. If there are fire-escapes, every pupil 
should have practice in using them. If there is no such prac- 
tice, it would be better not to have them. Disastrous attempts 
to use them might be made when safe escape could have been 
made without trying to use them. 

Tahing care of sick pupils at school is a duty for which the 
teacher should be ready. If the child is prostrated, the teacher 
should be able to tell what is the nature of the trouble : whether 
it is due to over-heating or to over-eating; if a fainting-spell, 
whether it is due to physical weakness or to hysterics ; and the 
teacher should know whether a physician is to be called, and if 
called, what is to be done in the interval before he arrives. In 
case of such common injuries as bruises and cuts, sprains and 
dislocations, the teacher should be able to judge how serious the 



112 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

injury, and to give wise care. The suffering from eating too 
much or eating the wrong thing, the pangs of cholera morbus, 
or even the effects of common poisons, the teacher should know 
how to treat. The causes of such common troubles as school 
headaches may be easy to remove if the causes are intelligently 
discovered. 

Exposure, weakness, fatigue, strain and worry of pupils 
should be guarded by the teacher. The pupils must be watched 
to prevent their endangering their health by wearing wet cloth- 
ing in school hours. The feet are the most exposed parts in this 
particular. The question whether the pupils are getting enough 
sleep and food is a proper one for the teacher to raise. The 
teacher has a right to demand the most efficient work possible, 
and to ask for the conditions that will allow that kind of work. 
The healthy condition of the special senses is of great impor- 
tance. Sight and hearing are usually considered as of most in- 
terest to the teacher. There are simple devices and processes 
for testing the eyes and the ears. The pupils should be tested 
as to the efficiency of these organs, and their work should ac- 
commodate any defects that cannot be removed. 

The fatigue point should be constantly approached by the 
pupil, but not reached. This point should constantly recede ; the 
pupil should grow day by day in his ability to work without be- 
coming unduly fatigued. The teacher does the best possible serv- 
ice for the pupils when he makes such conditions as will enable 
the pupil to do a great amount of work easily. A wise economy 
of energy is a saving for all time. Conditions of nervous ex- 
citement prevent the best work. The presence of a gloomy dis- 
position weakens as badly as a spell of sickness. The medicine 
of a merry heart has been long and well understood. The feel- 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. U3 

ing of pupils that they want to do and can and will do what the 
teacher wishes them to do, accomplishes wonders. The teacher 
should be able to read in the languid eye and the wandering 
attention the record of fatigue. He should be able to change 
the employment before the fatigue point is reached. The 
physical well-being of the pupils must always be a responsi- 
bility for the teacher. 

2. Play and Gymnastics. 

Children s desire for play has a foundation in nature. The 
child must have physical exercise. His body craves it, not ex- 
actly as it does food, but, nevertheless, as a necessity. Play 
is a mental exercise as well as a physical. The school teacher 
is likely not to value play as either of these kinds of exercise, 
but to consider it rather a disturbance of the educational func- 
tion that must be endured because it cannot be cured. He 
should know that the child who cannot play heartily is not 
ready for the regular school work. Those who work among 
the children of the slums in great cities find that the first edu- 
cational help needed by these children is help by means of 
play. The school can do no better service than to help children 
to good opportunities and good methods for play. The teacher's 
doing this service well should secure for him a large measure 
of charity toward whatever shortcomings there may be in his 
strictly professional equipment. There is no need of a teacher's 
engaging regularly in play with the pupils. Such participa- 
tion is likely to hinder his success in promoting play, ^ no mat- 
ter whether he excel in the games, or the pupils excel him, 
Occasional participation now in one game or group of pupils 
and then in another, will serve to show his interest. He should 



114 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT, 

be careful not to thrust himself into a game when not desired 
by all, and should be sure that he does not, when playing, exer- 
cise authority over the play in the manner of the teacher in the 
class-room. The playground should leave the pupil free from 
the feeling of restraint, and yet should be under such influences 
as will easily secure proper conduct. For many children, the 
companionship of the playground is the sole joy of the day. 
Its power to interest them in the school should never be de- 
stroyed. 

The teacher should know an abundance of good school amuse- 
ments. Such games of running as the various modifications of 
dare base and prisoner's base constitute a good type. Marbles 
constitute a temptation to play for " keeps/' The teacher will 
have good reason to take care that no one playing carry very 
many. Jumping the rope is not only liable to trip children to 
dangerous falls, but likely to lead to permanent injury in the 
effort to see how long it can be continued without rest. Games 
with the soft yarn ball of the olden time have been sadly for- 
gotten. Baseball and football and basketball are not games for 
the immediate neighborhood of the school building, where many 
pupils must find exercise without participating in the game. 
The teacher's success in school amusement is to be reached by 
prompting good leaders among the pupils to start good games 
rather than by his constantly forbidding the diversions that 
pupils will resort to for the lack of something better. 

The school recess as a time for play is a time of great respon- 
sibility for the teacher. At the noon intermission, he is not 
likely to have all the children in his care. 'The parents who do 
not wish their children to play without discrimination as to 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 115 

their companions, may manage the going to and from school so 
as to prevent mingling except at recess. The teacher takes the 
responsibility at recess. The ideal recess is far different from 
the actual. In our imagination it comes as a time of refreshing 
amid hours of dullness; it comes to bring rest to the weary, 
to bring strength to the weak, to bring cheerfulness to the 
gloomy, to bring new life and energy to the downcast and de- 
spondent. The hopeful theorist, in his " mind's eye" sees at 
the signal of the recess-bell every pupil rise promptly and pass 
out of the room to the playground, the very embodiment of that 
fitness of things which the well-known motto calls "Heaven's 
first law." The model teacher then throws open all the windows 
for ventilation and comfortably proceeds to put work on the 
board, or passes out into the yard to stand around and rest and 
refresh himself. 

In the meantime, these ideal pupils employ themselves in 
exercise without weariness, in play without roughness, in games 
without violence, in gymnastics without danger, and in merri- 
ment without coarseness, until fifteen minutes of social com- 
panionship have passed away, and vigorous students have been 
re-created from these scenes of recreation. Then at a signal 
these exemplary pupils quickly and quietly, of course, return 
to their work, and a minute hence their quickened powers are 
all, with rapt attention, bent on their studies. There are several 
important doubts as to whether this ideal is realized. Are the 
pupils who most need outdoor exercise always ready most 
heartily to take it? Are those whose strength will not endure 
playground exposure always ready to forego its pleasures ? Does 
the teacher find that the pupils remaining in the room allow 
him leisure to devote to his work, and opportunity calmly to 



116 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

collect his thoughts on some subject concerning which they 
have been slightly scattered, or does he not rather find his 
attention is necessary to seat the irrepressible lest their romp- 
ing raise the roof or literally bring down the ceiling ? Then he 
concludes that his keeping them in their seats all the time they 
are in the room is unnecessarily strict, and when he has re- 
leased them from this restriction they repay his kindness by 
healthfully kicking up all the dust the janitor has worked into 
the floor. Next day he thinks the weather is fine enough for 
all to go out of doors, and he goes out with them for the benefit 
of the outing. The pupils have already begun to enjoy them- 
selves when the teacher arrives. He sees a line of boys, hand 
in hand. They are playing " crack the whip." The larger boys 
at one end of the row are the crackers, the smaller boys at the 
other end are about to be cracked. He would stop this business, 
but he feels that they must have some exercise, and he has 
already forbidden "shinny," and has allowed no "batting the 
ball" since the recent breaking of a window-pane. He lets 
them proceed, and as he does not wish to see the catastrophe 
that may occur when the boys tumble, he diverts his attention 
to the group around the two boys who were " matching pins " 
when he let them stay in the house at recess yesterday. They 
are "tossing pennies" now, but they'll stop before he finds 
it out. 

He sees a number of boys on the gate and the adjacent por- 
tions of the fence. They are hooting at the awkward-looking 
cart a passer-by uses for breaking a wild horse. Well, this is 
something he will stop, at any rate, and he vigorously starts in 
that direction, but now he suddenly discovers it is time for the 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 117 

recess to close, and he must content himself with taking the 
names of the parties in view of the hereafter. 

But these evils of the recess which are apparent to every- 
body are not all nor the worst evils of the school playtime. 
While pupils of all ages and from all classes of society are 
thus mingled together, many of the little children get their 
first lessons in vile language and vile thought. While the 
teacher watches the conduct of all who seem to be doing any- 
thing, some quiet group of boys surrounded by all the gaping 
six-year-olds are bandying their obscene jests and uttering their 
nameless indecencies. No other impressions of youth cling so 
tenaciously as the stains from these foul mouths. 

This corruption of evil communication sometimes moves 
educators to seek the abolition of the long recess. Instead of 
turning loose the whole school for fifteen minutes each half- 
day, many teachers suspend the regular work for a short interval 
more than once, about five minutes at the end of every forty- 
five, or three minutes at the end of every thirty. At these 
intervals they let the pupils go out by special permission, and 
let them communicate and pass about the room under certain 
restrictions. 

Even to those who have not tried this method, objections and 
difficulties will readily occur. However the long recess may 
fail to give exercise, the short recess seems completely to ignore 
it, and certainly must still further deprive the pupils of their 
outdoor bath in air and sunlight. The plan has been found 
very unpopular, both with the pupils and with teachers. The 
children feel that it amounts to taking away the playtime which 
custom has allowed them from time immemorial; that the so- 
called five-minute recesses, with the teacher doing nothing but 



118 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

watch, are hardly so free as the hours of work when the teacher 
is too busy to disturb the sly amusements that might be or- 
ganized. 

The short recess as described above is better than the aboli- 
tion of recess, which sometimes is compensated for in bad 
weather by the early dismissal for the day. But before the 
short recess is undertaken, there should be a special prepara- 
tion for its management. The teacher should be prepared to 
make it the most interesting time of the day — more interest- 
ing even than needlessly going out of doors. At least until 
the new method is firmly established, he should so entertain 
the pupils that they will scarcely think of going out, else he 
will have enough requests for permission to amount almost to 
a general exodus. For the entertainment of the children the 
teacher may tell them stories, read them sketches, show them 
curiosities; but whatever is done or is neglected, the teacher 
must not weary. At the recess more is learned than in the 
same number of minutes any other time in the day. The les- 
sons then learned are too often lessons of disobedience, lessons 
of vice; if they can be lessons of order, lessons of goodness, 
the teacher has done his most difficult work. 

Open-air exercise away from school should be encouraged 
by the school. The free winds and the sunlight promote health. 
Three hours per day is as little time as the growing child 
should have in the open. Boys are likely to come up to this 
standard, but girls who are in school need every encourage- 
ment to reach it. There is, among girls, need of such en- 
thusiasm for outdoor play as will occupy them for more hours 
than the mere school intermissions. Boys may be kept in 
the open air by their usual employments outside of school 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. n§ 



hours, but the customs of this country do not offer to girls 
work under such favorable conditions. Outdoor games for 
girls, such as croquet and tennis, may receive encouragement 
at school, even though the facilities of the school grounds do 
not allow these games to be played there. 

Gymnastics should have a place among the exercises of the 
school, no matter how good the facilities for play, nor how 
much other exercise the pupils may have. Gymnastics will 
give in a short time more of symmetrical exercise than can either 
work or play. Heavy gymnastics, as we call those exercises in 
which the weight of the body is the resistance, are not prac- 
ticable to any extent without the equipment of a gymnasium. 
Light gymnastics, often called calisthenics, may be given in 
any schoolroom. Some of the apparatus of light gymnastics, 
as wands and Indian clubs, will demand considerable clear 
space. Music for the keeping of time adds to the interest, and 
improves the quality of the training. Military drill, if it in- 
cludes the carrying of a heavy musket by immature boys, will 
not give symmetrical development in the ordinary manual of 
arms. The interest in playing soldier sometimes furnishes the 
best means of inducing ordinary gymnastics. Military drill 
includes, indeed, some very good gymnastics in its regular 
" setting-up " exercises. All these physical exercises that keep 
time and obey words of command have a definite value in teach- 
ing promptness and ready obedience. The teacher who conducts 
gymnastic exercises successfully in his school will thereby gain 
better control of his pupils than he would otherwise have. All 
phases of play and gymnastics are matters of importance to 
the school. 



120 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

3. The School Spirit and the Spirit of the School. 

A school library built up by the efforts of the school may be 
the means of more good than would the owning of a library that 
costs no special effort and receives no particular attention. 
There is not only more pleasure in pursuit than in possession, 
but sometimes more profit also. If the pupils should become 
interested in saving newspaper clippings for the library, they 
would read with more purpose whatever papers come into their 
home. The teacher should understand the making and manag- 
ing of a library, and then the pupils can soon begin to see 
results that will make them take pride in their work. The set- 
ting of the school to gathering things entirely inexpensive may 
be done with such profit as to secure a collection of great value, 
but the improvement of the spirit of the school would be the 
greatest gain. The school as an organization will grow into the 
proper spirit by the undertaking of enterprises of its own. 

A school savings bank, while it might teach the habit of 
economy, would do a better thing in showing what wonders the 
cooperation of all can accomplish. 

The school garden might well become an American institu- 
tion. The residence of teacher or janitor at the schoolhouse 
would be necessary for the care of the garden here, as in those 
parts of Europe where the garden is maintained. The children 
would get the joy of ownership as well as the satisfaction of 
knowledge, when they see the growth of what they have planted 
and cultivated. 

A school paper, managed entirely by the students, serves for 
the building up of a school spirit. The experience of getting 
subscribers and of getting advertisements to pay for the print- 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 121 

ing, the experience of the struggle to keep out of debt, will 
bring good returns, even though it may not bring a very good 
paper. 

School partisanship with its noise in contests and its contests 
in noise is not without its redeeming results. The singing of 
school songs, the wearing of school colors, and the giving of a 
school yell, is more than the mere safety-valve for letting off 
steam that might otherwise cause an explosion; it cultivates 
a purpose to do something for the school, and although the thing 
now being done may be of doubtful utility, the spirit that grows 
in the doing will accomplish better things, although they may 
be things that do not attract so much attention as these demon- 
strations of youthful exuberance. 

School athletics are not so useful to promote physical culture 
as to promote proper spirit. Only a small part of the students 
improve themselves physically for or by athletics, except so far 
as spending time in the open air brings physical improvement, 
but the standards those few exemplify will have a wholesome 
effect on the whole school. Their recognition of the fact that 
regular hours of sleep, discretion in eating, and total abstain- 
ing from alcoholic stimulants and narcotics, are necessary for 
success, will stand as a more effective object lesson for the school 
than any the teacher or the preacher or the parent could present. 
The lesson of cooperation, of sacrificing personal honors to win 
the larger success, of sinking the individual in the mass, that is 
taught by team work, is a lesson valuable for all life. The 
student who is not more attached to his school by his interest 
in its athletic contests is hard to find, and the teacher who 
does not utilize this spirit of ardent attachment is missing an 
opportunity that will not come to him in any other way. 



122 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

Enthusiasm and patriotism may be successfully cultivated 
together. Enthusiasm is the very breath of life in a school. 
The etymology of the word is quite suggestive. The middle 
part is from the Greek for God, and the whole means the state 
of having a God within. The ancients thought of such a person 
as inspired. When a school is filled with enthusiasm, its mem- 
bers are ready for the noblest thoughts and the best of deeds. 
Patriotism can be inculcated only when feeling has risen to the 
heights of unselfishness. For those possessed of that ecstatic 
state of feeling, the flag can be made dearer than life itself. 

Pupils are more likely to stay through the whole course if 
there is a spirit of fairness and friendliness. The teacher who 
can build up such a spirit in his school may be sure of coopera- 
tion in every good work. He will secure sympathy in all his 
difficulties and need not hesitate to acknowledge his mistakes 
and apologize for his offenses. The teacher who learns to see 
from the pupil's point of view will succeed better than if always 
looking from his own. The value of " horse sense" is not the 
only lesson taught by the story of a boy who was generally con- 
sidered simple-minded. When asked how he found a stray horse 
when all others failed, he said he put himself in the horse's 
place and turned at each point just as he thought the horse 
would turn. The teacher who can think the thoughts of pupils 
will not let them stray away. In the school of such a teacher, 
a pupil will desire to stay until he has completed his work; 
to such a school the pupil will return at the first opportunity 
if he has been for any reason prematurely taken away. Price- 
less is the value of a school that imbues the young people of a 
community with a spirit that strives for lofty ideals, and that 
keeps every individual of that community devoted to its ideals. 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 123 

4. Special Occasions. 

Unimportant exceptions to the general course of events often 
attract undue attention. It must not be inferred that the sub- 
jects discussed in this book are taken up in the order of their 
importance. The employments which constitute the principal 
means of growth for the pupils are not extensively discussed 
under school-management subjects. This is true not merely 
because the management class, like the history class, prefers 
to deal with striking events, but because other departments of 
professional study for the teacher deal more particularly with 
the laws and conditions of mental growth. Exceptional exer- 
cises may serve for recreation and inspiration. The intellectual 
work of the school needs variety. The quiet of the usual condi- 
tions of the school is the time for doing the work which is 
inspired by the memory of public occasions -past and the in- 
spiration of public occasions to come. The school events to be 
discussed under the subject now approached are not usually 
employments of the school; if they were, they should not be 
called special occasions. 

The teacher s treating is known as an annual event in schools 
of pioneer times and frontier places. It has sometimes been 
the custom to make this special occasion once a year, usually 
about the holiday season, by shutting the teacher out and com- 
pelling him to treat. Often the teacher, expecting to follow the 
custom, feels that he must strive not to be outwitted, and so 
perhaps resorts to stopping the top of the chimney in order to 
smoke the house open. This custom should give way to some- 
thing better. The teacher can usually do better than to go 
away for the day, leaving the pupils in possession. His being 
able to collect salary without work until the board puts him 



124 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

in possession of the house does not contribute to his future 
success. The teacher would better forestall such attempts at 
forcing a treat. He can devise a special program that will 
divert the attention to something better. He will avoid the sus- 
picion of his being stingy if he devotes something of his means 
to the success of this program. 

The evening spelling-school and debating society are old- 
fashioned institutions. Although held in the schoolhouse and 
managed by the teacher, they are of value to a few pupils only, 
and serve to destroy the teacher's power of control during his 
regular school work. It may be wise for the school board to 
let the school building to responsible parties for such evening 
meetings, but the teacher should not be responsible. 

Public reviews of work covering what has taken considerable 
time in regular classes will often give zest to the school. Visits 
by the parents and friends of the school are not likely to be 
particularly helpful in the ordinary school work, but these 
visits are a joy to the children when there is something special 
to be visited, and it is surprising how little it takes of the 
special to induce such visits. A public oral review of work done 
in the classes, or a general exercise of any kind out of the ordi- 
nary, may be announced as a time when the school will 
" Take a cup and drink it up, 
And call the neighbors in." 

Rhetorical exercises may be managed so as to make good 
special occasions. If a regular time, for instance the last 
fourth of each Friday or of a certain Friday in each month, 
is given to exercises not connected with the regular studies, 
it is well to let the recitations displaced by these exercises dis- 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 125 

place in turn recitations of other parts of the day, so that in 
the rotation of four such periods, each recitation has been 
missed but once. The program of these occasions may be made 
up to some extent from what has developed in the class work. 
For example, there may have been a debate in the recitation 
in history, and the discussion started there may be repeated 
and amplified for the visitors. 

Anniversaries and birthdays of noted authors and others will 
often prove proper for school celebration. Whenever Friday 
comes on the birthday of some noted character, the usual literary 
program might be prepared appropriate to the anniversary. 
Days generally observed, but not school holidays, might wisely 
be celebrated on their appropriate date, and the exchange of 
recitation-time be made with a regular day of the week or month 
for special exercises. In general, it is not worth while to have 
anniversary exercises for a day that is not worth remembering. 
Schools have been known to make a special program for each 
recurring birthday of their teacher. That is not done for the 
purpose of fixing any date in mind, nor is it to be understood 
that the fixing of a date would ever justify the celebration of an 
anniversary. The examples approved and the noble aspirations 
awakened by the associations of the day constitute the rich fruit- 
age of an anniversary celebration. 

Art exhibits are a type of enterprise that the school may en- 
gage in as a means of introducing into the community helpful 
interest in worthy subjects. The schoolhouse walls furnish a 
space for the display. Ladies' clubs and other interested in- 
fluences may be enlisted to promote success. If the exhibit is 
in a city, police officers may be assigned to serve as guard for 



126 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

the exhibit. In such a way, a loan collection or a hired col- 
lection can be successfully managed, and the gain to the school 
fully justifies the trouble of such an exhibit. 

School excursions may be a means of education. These may 
range from a trip of an hour to some neighboring field or factory, 
to a journey of days to see remote mountains or waters or cities. 
The teacher needs to keep his school well in hand and to follow 
out a distinct plan of study if such a trip is undertaken. Much 
preparatory study must be made to quicken the curiosity and 
assure comprehension, and much review must be taken on the 
journey and after the journey, to secure the retention of what 
is learned. 

5. Miscellaneous Matters. 

The aim of the teacher s work should be well chosen. If he 
concerns himself chiefly with the question whether he can hold 
his position, and, holding, secure an increase of salary, his 
management of the school will be a failure. His working for 
aims more worthy than these will be more likely to accomplish 
these desirable results, and only by the teacher's working for 
worthier aims can his retention in his position be desirable. 
His worthier aims should be so evident and so well understood 
that the school authorities will not feel that it is wise to risk 
jeopardizing, by the choice of another teacher, the attainment 
of those aims. 

Efficiency rather than "knowledge is the end toward which 
the teacher should lead his pupils. The belief that knowledge 
is power has comforted many a teacher in his laying upon 
children tasks that no other belief could justify. Knowledge 
does not necessarily give power, any more than does hoarded 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 127 

wealth give power. Knowledge, like wealth, may be of such 
a kind that it is unproductive. The teacher must select for 
his pupils those kinds of knowledge that give efficiency. While 
the acquiring of any kind of knowledge may give a certain disci- 
pline, not all mental discipline contributes equally to efficiency. 
The value of both knowledge and discipline is to be tested by 
the resulting efficiency. The study of the Chinese language is 
a good memory discipline, but American schools can find enough 
memory discipline in knowledge which as knowledge will con- 
tribute more to efficiency. This is not saying that we should 
never require the study of subjects for the sake of an efficiency 
that results more from the discipline than from the knowledge. 
We can afford to ignore subjects that are of no value on the 
one side and of no especial value on the other. The teacher's 
plans of school management will be influenced by his choice of 
aim in the light of these considerations. * If he recklessly sets 
pupils to memorizing the Confucian traditions that have come 
down from his pedagogical .progenitors, he becomes a task- 
master worthy only of some semi-barbarous country. The 
American teacher must have better aims. 

Hobbies are liable to grow to dangerous size if the teacher 
makes a mistake in his choice of aims for his work. Sometimes 
prejudice is created against a really worthy effort by calling 
it the riding of a hobby. Every energetic and original teacher 
will be likely to introduce innovations. He is in danger of 
pushing his innovations until he inanifests a kind of spirit of 
partisanship for them. The promoting of a single reform may 
take so much time and attention that evils equally great are 
introduced in spite of this reform if not the direct result of it. 
The teacher may, by giving his attention too exclusively to one 



128 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

thing, make a mistake as serious as that of a physician who 
devotes his treatment to some one symptom of a patient, over- 
looking some fatal disease whose presence he did not suspect. 
The teacher must be careful not to let any one interest absorb 
his time and strength to the neglect of others vitally important. 

The doing of too much for the pupils frequently causes 
harm where good was intended. The teacher cannot learn the 
pupil's lessons for him. Knowledge cannot be gained without 
effort. The effort necessary to gain knowledge contributes quite 
as much to efficiency as does the knowledge itself. We would 
not know how to use wisely knowledge gained without effort, 
were it possible so to gain it. Inherited wealth is the least pro- 
ductive of the wealth of the country; there is no inherited 
knowledge. Animals that depend on instinct do not attain very 
great efficiency. Since human beings must work for their edu- 
cation, every one must be in a large measure self-made. The 
useful help that one can receive is but a small part of his edu- 
cation. Every possible facility should be given to every one 
for successful work. The best of conditions for study can do 
no harm, however freely they may be furnished. Free educa- 
tion never pauperizes. The finding of a royal road to learning 
would pauperize a king mentally. The teacher need not allow 
his pupils to make again all the mistakes of the race in order 
to get experience, but he must give them the training that comes 
from mastering for themselves the difficult things in their 
studies. 

Too much talk by the teacher is a very common fault. Things 
that need to be said, the teacher is likely to say too often. Min- 
isters have been known to confess that they try to say a thing 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 129 

three times in succession, with artful concealment of the repe- 
tition. The reason for this supposed necessity is that people 
have not been trained to understand from hearing a thing once. 
The teacher should train his pupils to understand the first time. 
If the teacher has the habit of repeating announcements, his 
pupils will let their attention wait for the second announce- 
ment. The repetition of admonitions awakens doubt as to 
whether the teacher knows what he will do if they are not heeded. 
Greater than the mistake of saying too often what needs to be 
said, is the mistake of saying things that should not be said 
at all. The teacher who declares things to be true that he does 
not know to be true, should be summarily dismissed from his 
place. There is righteousness in the homely saying of the 
modern philosopher, that it is better not to know so much as 
some people than to know so many things that are not true. 
The voluble talker is likely to tell in his schoolroom many truths 
that should not be told. He lowers the dignity of the teacher's 
desk by discussing there things that have no connection with 
the subject in hand, or gossiping in this honorable position about 
the trivial things that should not be elevated above common social 
conversation. Teachers, like other people, often need to regret 
having said too much, but seldom regret having said too little. 
The latter error can be soon corrected when discovered; the 
former, never. 

Thoughtless talk often brings bad results in the teacher's 
work. Great care must be exercised by the teacher if he is to 
make himself understood by his pupils. If a pupil gets into 
trouble with the teacher because the teacher's requirements were 
not clearly stated, both are likely to be seriously vexed, and to be 
ready for further misunderstandings. Joking utterances are 



130 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

dangerous where what is said should be a guide to action. Some 
will not know how to take the jokes, and some will take them 
as they should not be taken. The pupils should not be led to 
expect that most of the things said by the teacher are to be 
jokes. They should find better business in the schoolroom 
than watching to see when the teacher wishes them to laugh at 
something he has said to amuse them. Worse than the inten- 
tional making of a joke by the teacher is his unintentionally 
saying things that are funny. The teacher who, when seating 
his class alphabetically, said to Miss Jones that she should find 
a seat with the other Ps, was the loser by that remark. The 
pupils in laughing about the expression not only annoyed all 
of their number whose initial had been made to stand for a 
term of contempt and embarrassed the teacher by suggesting a 
meaning he had not intended, but they came from this experience 
with less respect for the teacher, and with an increased tend- 
ency to giggle at whatever would afford an excuse for doing so. 
The teacher who talks thoughtlessly is likely to suggest to his 
pupils chances for misconduct of which they never would have 
thought if he had been more discreet. The notice, " Keep off 
the grass," has made many a person think how pleasant it would 
be to go on the grass, and how little harm just once would do. 
The teacher needs to ponder well the effect of what he is to say. 

Anxious and impatient talk must not be habitual with the 
teacher. Pupils cannot do their best work under the leadership 
of one who is " fussy." The nagging method of governing chil- 
dren is bound to fail. The children pay little attention to the 
talk of a habitual scold. One who finds fault with all the little 
things receives little attention when he objects to great offenses. 
His habitual " Don't" becomes to the children the assurance 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 131 

that they are having a good time. He should learn to endure 
cheerfully what is not so seriously objectionable as to demand 
unqualified prohibition and positive punishment if the prohibi- 
tion is disregarded. It is ridiculous for the teacher to call after 
the children in their play, when they may act as if they did 
not hear him, and he may be in doubt whether they did. If the 
disorder is so serious that the teacher cannot take the chances 
of waiting for a convenient time to forbid it, he should get the 
attention of all the pupils from their play, and secure a re- 
spectful hearing for what he has to say. Then he should, if there 
is time, let them resume their play. The teacher must not as- 
sume a fretful fashion of talk in* any of his dealings with his 
pupils. 

The teacher s keeping his word is properly regarded by all 
parties as of very great importance. It is also important that 
the teacher should never do a wrong in order to keep his word. 
Due consideration of this fact will lead the teacher to be very 
careful lest he give his word without anticipating the circum- 
stances that will make it difficult to keep. The teacher should 
not allow himself to promise or threaten in such a way as might 
cause the mischief or the anger of any one to make situations 
merely for the purpose of testing him. The teacher's word 
should never be pledged in such a way as to make him feel em- 
barrassment in keeping it, nor should he find himself compelled 
to do, merely for the sake of keeping his word, things that he 
would not do as a matter of original decision. These cautions 
for the teacher must not be taken to mean that he is to be non- 
committal on all subjects of future policy. There are times when 
his position should be promptly and positively defined, and for- 



132 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

tunate is the teacher who can meet this responsibility without 
blunder and without bluster. 

The manner and the manners of the teacher will exert a 
continuous, positive influence for the better or the worse during 
all the hours of his presence with the pupils. This influence, 
during the ordinary work of the recitation, is more effective in 
discipline and in the promotion of character than is anything 
the teacher can do in special efforts toward these ends. If the 
teacher's manner is restless and unsteady, he disturbs the growth 
of the pupils in all that is best. If he walks the room contin- 
ually like a hyena in a cage, the school will feel something of 
the uneasiness that characterizes the hyena's neighborhood in 
the menagerie. If he assumes that his going near disorderly 
pupils in the schoolroom or the playground will help them to 
be good, he is likely to find that his very presence becomes irri- 
tating. The teacher's taking hold of children to push them 
around and accelerate their obedience to his directions, violates 
a certain sacredness of person that should be respected by every 
one. The teacher who seats unruly pupils at the front, and then 
stands leaning over them while conducting a recitation, is likely 
to provoke all the kinds of disorder that can be safely perpe- 
trated under the cover of the book that the teacher holds in his 
hand. The teacher should find and keep his proper range, as the 
gunners say. The most effective battery is useless if too close 
to the object of attack. The teacher should not bring on a 
hand-to-hand conflict in the struggle of which we are now speak- 
ing. His distance should be such as would make the easy range 
of his voice and sweep of his eye effective. The influence of 
the voice has been previously emphasized in these pages. The 
magnetism of the steady eye should also be a weapon in the 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL. 133 

quiver of the teacher. It was a single look that gave Peter the 
reproof that brought him to a sense of his sin. The eye is 
powerful to forbid intended evil. The Roman soldier, inured 
to slaughter, yielded to the remonstrance in the eyes of the fallen 
leader whom he was sent to kill, and feeling unable to face the 
fiery eye, fled, exclaiming, " I cannot kill Oaius Marius ! " 

The teacher's manners should be gentle in the sense that 
justifies genteel from the same root word. The hand of power 
should be the gloved hand. His greeting of pupils when they 
come to him with any request should assume that the request 
is meant to be reasonable. The pupil should not be driven from 
the teacher with rude impatience while there is yet a possibility 
that the pupil may be helped to make for himself the proper 
decision. Patience on the part of the teacher begets patience 
among the pupils. The teacher should be a, good listener at all 
times; during the recitation of a pupil he should listen in a 
way that makes all the waiting members of the class feel that 
nothing else is to be thought of than the most critical attention 
to the person who is speaking. There may be times when the 
teacher seems to do several things at once, but during most of 
his work he should set an example of good manners in giving 
undivided attention where his attention is due. A nervous neg- 
lect of such fundamental courtesy will beget the same nervous 
restlessness among pupils. Such a gentle manner and such 
genteel manners in a teacher will bless the school with a per- 
petual benediction. 



V. SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 



The exclusion of city schools from this chapter by the terms 
of the above heading is due to the fact that they present a 
peculiar class of problems because of their close organization 
under which schools of lower grade promote directly to higher 
grades that receive pupils exclusively from the lower grades 
in the same system. Schools having no such close relation and 
not combined under close supervision will be the subjects of 
separate paragraphs in this chapter, without any attempt to show 
what connection exists among them. 

1. Rural Schools. 

Advantages on the side of the rural elementary schools as 
opposed to elementary schools in the city, would be hard to find 
if we did not take into consideration the environment of the 
pupil outside of school hours. 

The pupils who come to school from the farm homes come in 
better physical condition for study. They are fresh from out- 
door employments that regularly give them wholesome exercise. 

There is greater independence of character among the chil- 
dren who constantly make choices for themselves on the farm. 
The following story of a city boy sent to spend the winter in 
the country may have been true. He was started to bring a 
load of corn from the shocks in the field. He stopped, unable 
to decide on which side he should pass by a stump that stood 

(134) 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 135 

midway between the rows of shocks. The country boy learns 
to make decisions for himself. 

The pupils attending rural schools do not have so many con- 
flicting interests as the city presents to take the attention from 
their studies. The ability to stand school work, as mentioned 
above, finds its opportunity in the long evenings regularly free 
from disturbance. 

The thought of the parents and of the entire community is 
so centered in the rural school that no other interests rival it. 
The work done by the children is the better for this general 
solicitude as to their success. 

Disadvantages of the rural schools are more likely to attract 
attention than are the advantages we have mentioned. They 
are more on the surface ; their causes do not lie so deep. 

Rural schools have a short year. A large per' cent, of those who 
enroll in the rural schools do not attend all of this short year. 
The necessity of skipping part of the course or going over a 
part of it at a sacrifice of time in order to maintain class recita- 
tions, is evident from the above conditions. 

The value of property being small in comparison with the 
number of children, there is meager financial support for rural 
schools. This fact explains in part the preceding disadvantage 
and more fully those that follow. 

Rural schools cannot retain the best teachers and will not 
retain those they could retain; hence there is very frequent 
change of teachers. 

Rural schools lack libraries and other valuable equipment for 
a school. They are not able to give such an equipment adequate 
care when it is provided. 



136 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

Rural schools lack adequate, if not competent, supervision. A 
supervising visit for an hour or even a day can do little more 
than disturb the school. Only with the supervisor's coming 
often enough to accustom teacher and pupils to his presence and 
to see that his advice is understood and heeded, can any consid- 
erable help come from supervision. 

Utilizing the advantages and overcoming the disadvantages 
is the problem of rural school management. The physical 
strength of rural pupils, their power of initiative, the absence 
of other interests that would turn from the school the thoughts 
of the pupils, and the community will give the teacher his op- 
portunity to secure good work in the school. Almost every 
student can be trusted to go forward in some direction faster 
than any class would go. He may recite occasionally or regu- 
larly with a class in the subject, his explanation of what the 
class is responsible for during an assigned lesson will help both 
him and the class, but he need not be tied down to doing no 
more than the class. The individual pupil need not be held to 
recite in the same grade in all subjects, when all grades sit and 
recite in the same room. The marking of time in the progress 
of a pupil through the rural schools keeps many a promising 
child from reaching the goal he would otherwise be able to 
attain. 

The disadvantages from the limited financial support may 
be, like other evils of poverty, sometimes blessings in disguise. 
The teacher does not depend on his superintendent, for the 
superintendent is too far away to help him out of his troubles. 
A railroad section-boss is necessary even if only one section- 
hand be at work, but this example does not prove in the case of 
the teacher the necessity of any excess in expense of superin- 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 137 

tendence above the expense of the work. If the rural schools 
cannot afford close supervision for their teachers, they must 
find teachers who can be trusted without such supervision. If 
too many classes for one teacher must nevertheless be cared for 
by one teacher, he must learn to combine classes in some sub- 
jects, and must learn to conduct classes in more than one sub- 
ject at a time, as when drawing and penmanship are both super- 
vised by the teacher at once, if it happens that the two subjects 
are taken by different pupils. Two classes in arithmetic can 
be cared for by the teacher at the same time if he lets one put 
its work on the board while the other is explaining work already 
on the board, or is discussing some subject not needing black- 
board work by the pupils. 

The lack of libraries may be compensated in some measure 
by the reading of what books are in the homes and a report 
of their contents in a way to enable the whole school to have a 
training that the ordinary use of a library could not give. There 
are compensations to be found in almost every privation. 

Courses of study for the rural schools of a township, a county 
or a state are sometimes presented. These serve as a standard 
around which the scattered forces may rally. They should not 
be fixed by law. The question whether the statutes should go 
so far as to require that all grades of pupils shall be taught the 
effects of alcoholic stimulants and narcotics, is warmly debated 
among teachers in many parts of the country. In general, a 
trustworthy superintendent or board should have power to revise 
courses of study when the changes in ability and in needs jus- 
tify revision. Schools should be protected against changes too 
radical, as well as against too great delay in making the changes. 
A reasonable minimum of achievement should be set forth in a 



138 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

i 

course, and thus the weakest may be led to attainments which 
they would not otherwise have attempted. Optional work 
should be suggested for the more capable and the more ad- 
vanced. It always happens that some students who have fin- 
ished the required course are not ready to leave the school. 
There should be opportunities for such, in order that they may 
not find their postgraduate work restricting them to a review 
of what they have probably mastered as completely as do any of 
the classes in which they must make their review. 

Examinations to test the work done on the course of study 
should use in part the questions of some central authority, per- 
haps the superintendent, in order that the different schools may 
know what work others are attempting. Occasional sending of 
all the answers to some one person or committee for grading 
will enable teachers and pupils to know whether they are reach- 
ing as good results as their rivals reach. The meeting of two 
neighboring schools for oral recitations or the meeting of the 
highest grade from three or four schools one day in the year 
would, if discreet teachers come with them, give results that 
would compensate for the loss of time in some of the subjects or 
by a part of each school. This would be a means of illustrating 
the proverb, "Iron sharpeneth iron." The social mingling of 
these students at recesses and in eating their lunch, as well as 
the common interest in all the doings of the day, would* be a 
means of growth not to be valued lightly. 

Graduating exercises may wisely be participated in twice by 
those who finish the rural school course, — first as a part or all 
of a school-closing program in the home district, then as a 
participation in the receiving of diplomas by the graduates of 
the year in the greater commencement for the entire township 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 139 

or county unit of supervision. Suggestions as to commence- 
ment program and the management of such occasions will be 
given later in this book in connection with city schools, and 

what is said there can be readily adapted to rural schools. 

• 

Alumni organizations are likely to be thought unimportant 
among rural school graduates. There is no other kind of school 
in which such an organization would give each member a greater 
chance for usefulness. The farm home should bring the alumni 
back to these meetings year after year. The literary and social 
life of a rural community could be lifted by the alumni of the 
home school as by no other influence. The pride of member- 
ship in such an organization will inspire its members to progress 
and to noble living through the years after their graduation. 
The alumni as an organization will not only stand for the in- 
creasing of facilities in this school of their childhood, which 
most properly of all may be called alma mater, but they will, 
in appearing from time to time as alumni, inspire the children 
in all grades of the school to persevere in its work, that they 
may attain the noble position of those who have done this work 
in earlier days. 

Laws as to rural schools may be discussed for the most part 
in other connections, but a few may be touched here. The pow- 
ers of the district meeting should be well understood. What 
are the provisions for giving notice of the meeting? What if 
without notices a few of the voters convene on the legal day 
and transact business ? What if no meeting is held ? What are 
the decisions that must be made by the district meeting if made 
at all ? What questions on which the board must exercise its dis- 
cretion if the district meeting has taken no action ? What is the 



140 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

manner of conducting the district meeting ? Is any work of the 
district meeting done in strictly democratic fashion; that is, 
as business would be done in a typical democracy? What are 
the provisions for changing school-district boundaries ? 

2. Plans for Uniting. 

Annexations not constituting a uniting of schools are often 
given a name in law that would indicate some kind of joining 
together. The joint district may not be the kind of union that 
constitutes strength. It may be the cause of so much trouble 
as to give a feeling that even " the times are out of joint." If 
the district is formed by the union of territory from two school 
jurisdictions under separate legal control, as from two counties, 
it is probably so formed because one or more of the pieces of 
territory united could not maintain a school alone, and could 
not be so attached to other territory as to make a successful 
district entirely under one control. It would seem that nothing 
except some natural barrier, like a river or a mountain-chain, 
should cause such divided allegiance. An obstacle so insuper- 
able as to exclude a portion of the people from participation in 
the school privileges of a political unit would seem to be suffi- 
cient to justify their joining to the adjacent political unit for 
all purposes of government, as well as for educational purposes. 
County or even state or national lines should recognize what is 
for the benefit of any section of people, if such recognition does 
not work harm to larger interests. For an appreciation of the 
difficulties in managing a joint school district, we must raise at 
this point the legal questions involved. What are the reasons 
to be recognized for the formation of such district? Who have 
the authority to form it ? How are the funds to be obtained for 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 141 

its support? Must the teacher have certificates valid in each 
of the portions of the district ? Does his having a certificate 
valid in a larger portion make his legal standing better than 
if he has a certificate valid only in a smaller portion ? Shall the 
reports of the school be made to the authorities having jurisdic- 
tion over the different portions of the district, and if so, shall 
the whole report for the district be sent to each such authority, or 
shall teacher or district board make the distribution of items? 
If the district reports are sent to one authority only, how is 
the decision to be made as to which authority ? From whence 
is to come the supervision for the joint district? If trouble 
arises in the joint district, what is the higher authority to which 
appeal is to be made, and what is the authority to make deci- 
sions between teacher and district board, or to reverse decisions 
of either or both of these district authorities ? What authority 
can disorganize a joint district, and what is the process? In 
some kinds of partnership, it is said that joys are doubled and 
sorrows are halved; in the kind of partnership found in a 
joint district, it is often the case that difficulties are doubled 
and success is halved. 

A provision for transferring pupils to the school of an adja- 
cent district often accomplishes more successfully between dis- 
tricts what the joint district is designed to accomplish. This 
leaves unity of control. An equitable transfer of funds for the 
payment of tuition should in such cases have clear legalization. 

The attaching of adjacent territory to cities for school pur- 
poses is more equitable than the making of arrangements to 
pay tuition of such pupils from rural district funds. The differ- 
ence between city school privileges and rural school privileges, 
tKe difference between city tax rates and rural tax rates, would 



142 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



cause dissatisfaction if the rural districts should pay tuition 
from their school funds. We should consider the legal question 
as to whether the city and the people of the territory attached 
may make an agreement for union that will cause adjacent 
rural districts to be mere disabled fragments. What is the 
legal remedy in such cases? Who has the power to prevent 
confusion or to bring order out of confusion ? When territory 
has been attached to a city, is there legal provision for detach- 
ing it? The question as to what provision is made for the 
ownership of school property in such cases may be touched here, 
although it is the intention to discuss this subject more fully in 
the later pages of this book, under the subject of providing 
financial support. What shall be done with unused funds in the 
treasury before uniting? Shall territory transferred from one 
district to another escape the responsibility for outstanding 
bonds, or come into responsibility for bonds already issued? 
When all these questions are answered, it will probably appear 
that such uniting of territory with divers conditions is very likely 
to cause trouble. 

Consolidation of schools is sometimes provided for by law as 
the voluntary action of contiguous school districts. When study- 
ing legislation on this subject, we should look for provisions 
allowing the employing of regular transportation to carry pupils 
to and from school over the greater distances they would prob- 
ably need to traverse. Such legislation should be studied care- 
fully to see whether it guards against excessive expense. In 
many communities, measures of this kind should, without in- 
creasing the expense of the schools, greatly add to their effi- 
ciency as well as give greater protection to the health and com- 
fort of the pupils. Instead of from three to five ungraded 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 143 

schools, the consolidation gives a single central graded school 
at a distance not more than two or three miles greater from 
the remotest home. A concrete statement of the benefit would 
be the declaration that four teachers could more successfully 
instruct a hundred to a hundred fifty pupils in a graded school 
than could each of them do all the teaching for even less than 
a fourth of the number in an ungraded school. Besides the 
argument in the cold business proposition above stated, there 
is the enthusiasm of numbers, the greater momentum that comes 
from the movement of a larger body. 

Union or graded school districts are sometimes provided for 
by a vote authorized by statute. This plan provides for the 
organization of a central school for the more advanced pupils 
only. These older pupils could probably, in the main, take 
care of their own transportation, being able to control the ani- 
mals they ride or drive. In many families, however, the 
younger children might better go a considerable distance with 
the older rather than a shorter distance by themselves. However 
desirable for the more advanced pupils may be the chance to 
recite in classes instead of suffering the loneliness of working 
by themselves in a school close to their homes, the weakness of 
a very small school of beginners is a result of this plan not to 
be risked if it can be avoided. 

The township system of organization for rural schools is 
commended because the area of six miles square, with about the 
usual density of population, is most convenient for school or- 
ganization, maintenance and supervision. This unit of organi- 
zation was fixed in some of the states by the provision that the 
proceeds of the sale of section sixteen in each township should 



144 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



go to the support of schools in that township. The fact that 
this section happened sometimes to be almost worthless accounts 
for the effort of such states to throw the township school fund 
into a general state school fund. Even when there is no town- 
ship permanent fund, the maintenance of the schools can be 
based on the township unit, either congressional or municipal, 
and a township treasurer can receive and distribute funds for 
the schools of the entire township. For the choosing of this 
treasurer and of any other school officers with the same juris- 
diction, the municipal township is the more convenient unit 
so far as the conducting of elections is concerned, The school 
districts composing the township organization must have their 
own local officers, and the boundary line between the duties 
of district and of township officers must be well defined. At the 
head of the township system of schools should be the township 
high school, which can of course be so located as to allow its 
students to return to their homes daily. 

3. Separate Schools. 

Schools not supervised by any distinct officer going from 
school to school, as do the supervisors of the schools we have 
been discussing, are usually schools of more than one teacher, 
and the work of the various teachers in each school is supervised 
more or less closely by the principal of the school. 

County high schools, county normal schools and county insti- 
tutes, probably connect most closely with the schools we have 
been discussing. Some or all of these should be efficiently main- 
tained for the preparation of the rank and file of teachers and 
for the inspiration of the educational forces of the county. 
These agencies for education are the most efficient means avail- 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 145 



able for the success of the county superintendent in his work. 
The county high school is usually regarded as a fitting-school 
for more advanced or more technical institutions, but there are 
some developments of this kind of high schools in some states 
along the line of thorough preparation in the industrial arts. 
The kind of agricultural and mechanical training given in these 
industrial schools will be discussed in other connections, and 
need not be dwelt upon here. Teachers' institutes and county 
normal schools should be open to no students except those who 
are preparing to teach. Such restriction is demanded by both 
good faith and good policy. The funds to support these means 
of training are given for the preparation of those who are to 
enter the public service; the training for this public service 
will be more effective if every one in the classes has an eye 
single to this service. The student of this text should hold 
himself responsible for the thorough study of whatever stat- 
utes may be in operation on the above subjects in the state 
of which he is to be a citizen. 

State normal schools are the State's means of setting such a 
standard for teachers as to protect the State's school fund from 
being used to pay the unworthy; state normal schools place 
equipment for teaching in the reach of those who would other- 
wise not be induced to make adequate preparation in order to 
earn the limited financial remuneration offered to teachers. 
The state superintendent of public instruction finds these schools 
great promoters of his work, and he usually has some official 
connection with their management. If there are several nor- 
mal schools in a state, he may well be the unifying influence in 
boards of control that differ in all other membership. If all 



146 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

the normal schools of a state are under one board, there may be 
less of rivalry among them than if the boards were distinct, but 
there can be no such thing as complete uniformity when there 
must be variety among teachers and pupils at least. Even if 
there be no organization for making some of the schools auxil- 
iary to another, or for making special kinds of normal schools, 
the schools will irresistibly differentiate. If there were but 
one normal school in a state, there should be a variety of oppor- 
tunity for the students who are fitting in it for teaching. State 
normal schools should give higher training for teaching than 
can be given in county institutions, and should, in connection 
with these institutions and others that give adequate profes- 
sional training for teachers, supply all the public schools with 
teachers specially trained for their work. 

The state university has so many points in common with the 
state normal school as to boards of control and provisions for 
support, that the law topics concerning the two are suggested here 
together. What about the constitutional land grant for endow- 
ment? What about annual tax levy fixed by the constitution 
for buildings or maintenance ? What endowment given by leg- 
islation? What limitations in constitution or laws as to sub- 
jects that may be taught ? v This combining of law topics here 
is not meant to suggest that the university is in the same class 
with the normal schools. It should rank by itself as the state's 
institution for original investigation, a collection of colleges, 
as the name implies. Every school in the state should feel the 
call which the university gives to higher learning and to higher 
ideals. 

The state agricultural college has a national endowment from 
the proceeds of thirty thousand acres of land for each senator 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 147 

and representative in the national congress according to the 
census 6f 1860. This gave at least ninety thousand acres to 
each state. The states which had large delegations in congress 
when the bill was passed in 1862 received immense land grants. 
The national government supplements the income from this 
endowment with an appropriation for each year to maintain an 
agricultural experiment station which is connected with the 
agricultural college and has the benefit of the franking privilege 
in the distribution of its reports through the mails. The cost 
of the building and grounds for the agricultural college is not 
paid from national appropriations; the general government 
wisely requires that states shall, in order to secure national aid 
for the promotion of agriculture and the mechanic arts, make 
corresponding drafts on their own resources. Concerning state 
aid to the agricultural college, the student should be prepared 
to answer many of the questions asked in the preceding para- 
graph. Of the function of the state agricultural college in the 
state educational system, much might be said. This school 
raises the standard of efficiency in the employments that en- 
gage most of our population. It is the means of direct connec- 
tion between the builders of the state's material progress and 
those aids which the general government is seeking to give from 
departments organized to promote that progress. 

Schools for defectives, and even for normal children whose 
lack of proper guardianship makes them likely to become a 
public care, should be included in a study of school management. 
There is no well-defined break between the plans for the manage- 
ment of these children and the plans that must be followed for 
the management of children elsewhere who approach the con- 
ditions which characterize the inmates of these state institu- 



148 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



tions. The blind can be more economically cared for in a 
school where all are blind. The educational means and meth- 
ods chosen will there be only such as are adapted to their limita- 
tions. The same is true of the deaf and dumb, or the imbeciles, 
or those of weak moral character. There are, nevertheless, dis- 
tinct losses to these children in their isolation from normal chil- 
dren, and these losses the teacher should make good as far as 
possible in building up with greatest care the dormant powers 
of healthy life in each child. A training in industrial pursuits 
is not only important as a means to this end, but also as an 
equipment for later life. The preparation of each child for 
respectable self-support will thus be enhanced, and a genuine 
contribution will be made to the public weal. 

Church schools provide the whole range of instruction, from 
the parochial elementary schools to the university, including also 
such special institutions as military schools for boys, and schools 
to teach accomplishments for girls. All these church schools are 
of a responsible character, because they have the support of 
earnest people who bring success to whatever they undertake. 
The spirit of self-sacrifice which animates those who control 
these schools is the spirit that ennobles its every deed. The de- 
sire of parents to keep their children in the atmosphere of their 
own particular religious faith is worthy of the highest respect. 

Private schools, whether owned by a single individual or by 
some kind of partnership or stock company, undertake almost 
any work that gives promise of supporting itself by the fees 
of its patrons. These schools are sometimes called independent 
schools, because they acknowledge no allegiance to any system 
of schools or to any controlling board or organization. Busi- 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 149 

ness colleges and correspondence schools usually depend upon 
income from giving short courses to large numbers. They do a 
valuable service for those who from some reason lack time 
and opportunity to take courses more comprehensive, but they 
should be so managed as not to lead away from a broader and 
more thorough education. Correspondence instruction should 
help to better results than unaided study could attain, but it 
cannot give such rapid and safe progress as should be made in 
the personal presence of a teacher. Sometimes private schools 
give a fitting for college or some other such extended training 
for those who have the means to pay for long-continued in- 
struction given to a small number of students. The personality 
of the proprietor of a private school is the chief factor in its 
products. 

4. Supervision. 

National authorities can hardly be said to exercise anything 
like general supervision of the schools of the United States. 
There is a national superintendent of Indian schools, whose 
chief is the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the head of a 
bureau in the Department of the Interior. The supervision of 
such widely scattered schools must, under these circumstances, 
fail to be very close, even though the superintendent be aided 
by some traveling inspectors. The appointment of employes 
in these schools has some such limitations as the Civil Service 
Commission is authorized to make for most of the positions 
bestowed by the national government. The local superintendent 
in each school has practically the same functions as the prin- 
cipal in the well-known type of private boarding-schools, it 
being deemed necessary to take the Indian children out of the 



150 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



surroundings of their home life in order to educate them into 
civilization. 

In territory under the control of the war department, as 
was Cuba for a short time, and as Puerto Eico and the Philip- 
pines remained for a long time, the organization of the school 
system and the administration of its affairs became the duty of 
special commissioners or superintendents appointed by the gen- 
eral government, without particular legislation for the emer- 
gency. Trained and experienced teachers from the normal 
schools and the ranks of the profession in those states having 
the best educational systems were taken to the islands to in- 
struct native teachers and to introduce the management desired 
in the new organization. 

The National Commissioner of Education is the head of a 
bureau in the Department of the Interior. The question why 
this position is not dignified with recognition as a cabinet mem- 
bership is often raised. A consideration against this is the 
fact that cabinet officers are regarded as political advisers of 
the President, and it is not desirable that educational positions 
be disturbed by the recurring changes in the presidency. The 
work of the bureau of education is chiefly the collection and 
distribution of information. The voluminous reports which it 
issues from the government printing-office are the means of keep- 
ing educational leaders in touch with the best there is in educa- 
tion, both at home and abroad. The counsel of the Commis- 
sioner of Education, both in these reports and in his addresses 
before meetings of teachers, is potent in shaping educational 
policies throughout the country. 

State supervision is the really comprehensive supervision. 
The United States does not have a school system, each state 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 151 

does. The State's supervision is sometimes vested exclusively 
in one executive officer, sometimes in a board which appoints 
executive officers, sometimes partly in a board of which a general 
supervisor is the ranking member, and sometimes unfortunately 
divided between distinct and independent heads in such an in- 
definite way as to make great confusion. While periodical 
election on a general ticket with the state officers on nomination 
by a state convention is the usual method of selecting the state 
superintendent, there are other means used in some states. The 
question whether this office should be regarded as a political 
perquisite, and its incumbent be expected to participate in politi- 
cal campaigns and be limited to but one term or a few terms at 
most, should really not be difficult to answer. With these sug- 
gestions on this point, the student is requested to study the or- 
ganization for his own state, and, comparing the plan with such 
as he may know about in other states, reach his own conclusions 
as to excellences and defects. The force of deputies, assist- 
ants and clerks allowed to the state superintendent should be 
large enough to give him leisure for the study of the problems 
to be solved by him. Only with such ample help can the state 
superintendent find time to make himself familiar with the 
conditions in all parts of his jurisdiction. Inspectors for high 
schools and specialists in other lines of work are often appointed 
and assigned by him. Here again is a call for special study to 
discover what are the allowances and helpers given to the office 
in the state where the student lives. The local superintendents, 
whether the territory they cover be the county or some area 
larger or smaller, should be the state superintendent's most effi- 
cient coadjutors. He should adapt to their appreciation the 
plans he makes, for he can hardly hope to succeed in anything 



152 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



without their cooperation. He should give through them such 
cohesion to the educational forces of the state as will cement a 
union of scattered members into a structure of effective strength. 
The superintendent's power of determining who shall be allowed 
to draw public moneys for services in the schools, is the most 
important that he possesses or should possess. This power, more 
than any other, can raise the standard of the schools. The 
superintendent cannot accomplish very much in giving instruc- 
tion to teachers, he cannot do much by the mere giving of in- 
spiration, however inspiring his influence may be, but if he can 
see that only the competent draw upon the school funds, the 
standards he sets will be met. The superintendent's printed 
reports may be the means not only of guiding teachers and 
school officers, but of furnishing information and suggestions 
that will lead legislators to make adequate provision for educa- 
tion. Through this report, not only the statistics from all parts 
of the state, but also the suggestions of county superintendents 
and other educational workers may receive publicity. Fortunate 
is the state whose superintendent can furnish reports that will 
be read with both interest and profit by those who shape the 
schools from without as well as those who shape them from 
within. 

Local supervision, whether it be county or township, has the 
inestimable advantage of giving the overseer a personal acquaint- 
ance with all whose work he is to oversee. It has been found in 
all the world's history that the commander who has secured the 
best service from each individual under him has been he who 
can truthfully say, 

"And, like Caesar, I knew the name of each of my soldiers." 
Personal acquaintance with each teacher gives the largest re- 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 153 

suits. New and inexperienced teachers necessarily come into 
the work every year; fortunate is every such teacher who can 
have early and frequent visits from an intelligent and sympa- 
thetic superintendent. The superintendent should be able to 
tell the teacher something of the peculiarities of the patrons 
and pupils, and should be quick to see what, if anything, is 
being done by the teacher that must be stopped or corrected in 
order to avoid a catastrophe. It is not possible that the dis- 
covery of dangers, the proposing of safeguards against them, 
and the examining of those safeguards to see whether they are 
properly constructed, can all be done at one visit. The superin- 
tendent should see these things during many inspections. He 
can also interest the patrons in intelligent visits to the schools, 
and he alone can guide the school boards into proper habits of 
visiting the school if they have not already formed such habits. 
The superintendent's visit to the district will of course include 
a visit to the district officers. There is need that the records as 
kept by the clerk and the local treasurer, whoever he may be, 
shall be frequently inspected by a competent authority. The 
teacher's register should be examined, and both teacher and 
board should be advised what is to be shown by this record, and 
how it is to be shown. The building and grounds should have 
a careful inspection when superintendent, board and teacher can 
go over them together. The superintendent should be a strong 
influence throughout his jurisdiction in the shaping of plans 
for new buildings whenever such plans are being made. In this 
connection it is suggested that he should guide in the selection 
of a new teacher when that is being done. The hiring of a 
teacher for a few months may not seem so important as the 
construction of a schoolhouse at greater expense to stand for 



154 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



many years, but if we remember that the teacher, in a service of 
even a short time, builds into the structure of every child's mind 
and character what can never be destroyed, we shall appreciate 
that all possible help should be secured in making a wise choice 
of the builder who is to make or mar this enduring structure. 

The supervisor's qualifications will, in the light of what has 
been said, become a matter of concern. It is not proposed to 
discuss them at much length here, except in so far as may be 
suggested by the legal requirement in regard to his election, 
powers and duties. Is he a necessary officer in the system? 
Does the state constitution provide for him in such a way that 
the legislature could not abolish his office? Is the financial 
support of the position sufficient to secure the services of a com- 
petent person ? What qualifications may be demanded by law ? 
Is the legal method of selecting these officers the best that could 
be devised? What are the duties required by law, and is it 
possible for any one person to discharge all these duties up to 
the letter of the law? 

5. Items of Management. 

Uniform examinations for teachers throughout the entire 
state are usually regarded as a means of raising the standard of 
qualification. There may be portions of the state so greatly in 
advance of the average that examinations within reach of the 
average would make a lower standard than is best for the more 
advanced. There is danger also that the questions made by the 
central authority may be entirely out of range of the subjects 
as taught by public school teachers. There is also a further 
danger that questions prepared by several members of a com- 
mittee and including many subjects, will demand more time 
than can be allowed for the proper amount of thought and the 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 155 

slow process of writing. To give candidates for the various 
grades of certificates the same questions on any given subject is 
to run the risk of making some of the questions so easy as not 
to interest the more advanced, or else of making all so difficult 
as to give the less advanced no chance to do anything. Better 
than this would be the giving of a little of this kind of experi- 
ence to each of these two classes of candidates. This can be 
done by making easy questions enough and questions easy 
enough to let the minimum per cent, be attained by any who 
are worthy of a certificate, and making the remainder of the 
questions so difficult that none who are not sufficiently strong 
in the subject to merit the higher grade of certificate will be 
likely to make a per cent, above that required for the lower cer- 
tificate. If the examination papers made throughout the state 
on these questions were all sent to the same committee for 
grading, so that all answers on the same subject might be esti- 
mated by the same person, there would be greater uniformity of 
standard, but the delay in reporting to candidates the results 
of examinations would be very annoying. Such examiners 
could hardly be expected to finish reporting on one examination 
much before the time for giving another, for they would be 
properly expected to give practically their entire time to grad- 
ing examinations. The local examiners in each county will be 
more responsive to the call for early reports. The local exam- 
iners will also temper their severity to the standards of their 
respective communities. There is danger that they may not 
feel sure what answer the maker of the questions may desire in 
some cases. While it might be a good test of the questions for 
their author to try preparing answers before he asks others to 
answer them, it is doubtless best to let the local examiners in- 
terpret the questions as they please. 



156 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

State Text-Booh Boards do not control interests of so great 
importance as should the board that could decide who are to teach 
the schools of the state, but the material interests involved in 
the work of such boards cause very harsh judgments. Whether 
such a board provides for state publication of school books, or 
makes a state adoption of books offered by publishing compa- 
nies, there will be a storm of criticism. Booksellers who find 
their market restricted by the action of the board, and book- 
buyers who find their choice restricted, all unite in dissent. The 
people who are enabled by the low prices to get books that they 
could not otherwise buy, make less demonstration of their sat- 
isfaction than do the above-named classes of their dissatisfaction. 
The real question in seeking to save expense by uniformity is 
the question whether the great diversity of pupils can wisely be 
brought to identity of text-books. The selections made by a 
state text-book commission are not intended to be the only books 
a child shall use, nor is it to be understood that every child 
should use all the books selected. An honest compliance with 
law does, however, more good in the teaching of proper public 
spirit than would be done by any evasion of law to suit a pref- 
erence that may after all not have any proper basis. 

Standards for private schools are sometimes established by 
state authority, on the ground that the interest of the state in 
the education of all the people justifies some supervision of non- 
state schools, as well as the control of schools supported by the 
state. Compulsory education is to be discussed elsewhere in 
this book, but it may be remarked here that the reasons for 
compulsory attendance justify the state's demanding proper 
standards in all schools where the attendance of children is 
accepted as meeting the requirements of the law. Since, how- 
ever, public schools have very great differences in the subjects 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 157 

taught and in the thoroughness with which they are taught, it 
is evident that the fixing of a minimum for the work of children 
in parochial or other non-state schools should be done in a very 
generous spirit. If there is no standard fixed/it may be assumed 
that the parents who Bend their children to these schools at a 
considerable extra expense, or at least without any saving of 
expense, will insist that these children receive proper instruc- 
tion. 

Collegiate degrees conferred by non-state schools are some- 
times criticised as may be degrees conferred by state-supported 
schools. The same degree may mean, in length of course, in 
subjects studied and in thoroughness of study, very different 
things in two institutions. In fact, it cannot, even in the same 
year, mean the same thing in the same institution. It is some- 
times proposed that the state shall fix a standard for a given 
degree, so that the degree shall not be discredited. Whether 
this shall be done as a means of maintaining high standards in 
educational institutions may be a question, but the propriety of 
fixing a standard for a degree that carries with it any preroga- 
tive, such as the right to a teacher's certificate, can hardly be 
a question. But here again comes the presumption that any 
school which would give degrees to persons who do not know 
enough to teach in the public schools, would soon be so discredited 
that few would care to receive its degrees. 

Commencement and alumni meetings are matters of school 
management, even though the former is the last exercise given 
by students, and the latter are exercises participated in by those 
who have ceased to be students. The commencement program 
should not be unsuited to either class or audience. For district- 
school graduates who have never been trained in original com- 



158 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 



position to be asked to give at commencement the first essays 
and orations of their lives, is absurd. Neither should they be 
required to prepare graduate essays and orations that they are 
not to give. If these are to be prepared as a part of their course, 
they should be prepared before the rush of preparation for com- 
mencement begins. If the first essay is prepared just before 
commencement, the suggestions of teachers and friends will 
probably make something so wonderful that the student feels he 
will never have its like again, and he becomes anxious to deliver 
it in public. In commencements with classes small enough for 
all members to give an exercise without too greatly lengthen- 
ing the program, it is better to let each member give whatever 
dignified and interesting performance he can best give. Decla- 
mation or music well given is more satisfactory to all parties 
than essay or oration unworthy of the occasion. A graduating 
class may be able to give all the exercises of its commencement 
except the presentation of diplomas. The taking of the time 
at commencement by a lecture, even though it is addressed to 
the class, is not usually so satisfactory as the giving of exer- 
cises by the graduates. The lecture, however, relieves embar- 
rassment as to choice of participants when the class is so large 
that only a few of its members could appear on the program. 
Even under these conditions, each graduate should at least 
have the recognition to be found in going forward for his diploma 
when his name is called. The class and the audience are all 
more interested in the graduates on such an occasion than in 
anyone else likely to appear on the platform. 

The alumni reunions should be something more than mere 
social occasions for their members. A public meeting should 
present a program that will interest the new graduates, the 
undergraduates, and all the friends of the institution. The great 



SCHOOLS LOOSELY UNITED. 



159 



danger for the speakers on such occasions is that they will make 
addresses which seem dry to those who have been listening to 
the exercises of the school. If the alumni have come together 
from widely scattered homes, they do not easily come in tonch 
with the local conditions. They often dwell in a different world. 
A sprightly and enthusiastic message from this outer world of 
theirs should be presented so as to inspire those who look for- 
ward to entrance into this same business world. The greater 
problem of an educational institution is rather the inducing of 
graduates to return for alumni meetings. The feeling that they 
will find many old acquaintances who are expecting them will 
do much to bring them. Correspondence among the members of 
a class to assure each that the others will be there, is most potent 
to secure a full attendance of that class. As it is not easy in 
an institution with widely scattered alumni to bring many of 
all living classes every year, the custom of holding quinquennial 
or decennial reunions is suggested for the overcoming of the 
difficulty. If one can know that every five years after gradua- 
tion, special attention will be given to the assembling of his 
class, he will feel a sense of personal responsibility for attend- 
ing. Continual interest in alumni meetings will give a strong 
guaranty of continual interest in the school from which the 
participants in these meetings graduated. 

Teachers' Meetings are invaluable in promoting the coopera- 
tion of the educational forces in schools loosely united. While 
attendance at such meetings in city schools is easy and may be 
practically compelled, and while it is easy to organize those who 
have homogeneous interests, it will be readily understood that 
the heterogeneous forces engaged in the work we are now dis- 
cussing cannot be so easily brought into cooperation. The dis- 
tances to be traversed for the meetings are barriers against 



160 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. 

attendance. The teacher can usually stay at his regular school 
work with less expense and less effort than would be necessary 
in going to an educational meeting. The school funds might 
wisely, under proper restrictions, be used to pay per diem and 
mileage for such attendance. 

The supervising authority will be the most potent influence 
to promote the organization and maintenance of teachers' meet- 
ings. This office can assume no more important function than 
the planning of such meetings. The territory supervised is 
usually large enough for district meetings ; there is always need 
of plans for assembling teachers, on the basis of restricted in- 
terests, as, for example, those who teach the same classes of 
schools or those who are teaching the same subjects. The dis- 
creet superintendent will, while attending these meetings, as 
far as possible keep himself free from practically all the phases 
of management that can be successfully entrusted to others. 

The sense of personal responsibility on the part of every 
teacher is vitally important to the success of teachers' meetings. 
The feeling of anyone that he may be spared from attendance 
and from a readiness to participate in the work of the hour, not 
only makes him useless, but spreads the same feeling among 
others. No disease is more contagious than indifference. A 
yawn in any company is sure to compel other yawns. Every 
teacher should be so thoroughly infected with vigor as to make 
it contagious. Some critic of the plans of Providence says good 
health instead of disease should have been contagious. How- 
ever that may be, good spirit as well as bad spirit is contagious. 
The presence of the good is the most potent influence to banish 
the bad. We teachers must, if we would bring honor and success 
to our profession, be loyal to that profession in " not forsaking 
the assembling of ourselves together." < 



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